Chris White Tech Reporter May 03, 2020 2:02 PM ET
- Maryland Rep. Andy Harris wants the Environmental Protection Agency to review a Harvard University study suggesting pollution could create an 8% increase in the United States’s coronavirus death rate.
- One top critic of the study told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the university’s research is unfounded and relies on faulty modeling and testing.
- The university’s researchers initially claimed that people in certain areas of the country are 15% more likely to die of the virus, but quietly edited the study to dramatically change the nature of the study’s findings.
Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland is asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct a rigorous review of a Harvard University study associating high pollution levels to an increase in coronavirus deaths as researchers criticize the researchers’ findings.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler should conduct an investigation into the study, which suggests a link between pollution and higher rates of coronavirus deaths, Harris wrote to Wheeler on Saturday in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Harris addressed the letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as well.
Harris’s letter refers to a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study, published April 4, concluding that an increase in long-term exposure to particulate matter leads to an 8% increase in the coronavirus death rate.
Areas with elevated levels of pollution are likely to experience higher death rates during the pandemic, the research claimed.
The study initially claimed that people in areas with high levels of pollution are 15% more likely to die but added an April 24 clarification that reads: “We have revised our finding as that an increase of 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate.”
The revision noted that the study changed after researchers included “confounding factors” impacting the virus.
Harvard’s research received extensive media attention with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times publishing articles highlighting the study’s original claims.
The outlets have not yet updated their reporting to reflect the April 24 clarification posted on the school’s website. (RELATED: Trump’s EPA Makes Big Changes To Rule Banning ‘Secret Science,’ Obama-Era Officials Rage)
“It is incumbent on you to accurately communicate the best available scientific understanding of the virus and the factors that may influence patient outcomes, not only to ensure American citizens are not misinformed, but also to enable proper allocation of resources,” Harris wrote in the letter to Wheeler. Researchers have come out of the woodwork to criticize the study.
The study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, relies on a “statistical model that has not been tested and verified as yielding accurate predictions,” Tony Cox, who chairs the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, told the DCNF.
He and other researchers say spikes in deaths in certain areas were more likely a reflection of where those regions were on the virus curve rather than pollution.
Cities also have higher levels of air pollution, not to mention they have higher death rates from COVID-19 for reasons unrelated to pollution.
There are other factors that contribute to the virus’s spread. States and counties have adopted different social distancing guidelines, with states like Georgia adopting lax efforts while California adopted strict mitigation policies.
Neither the EPA, or Harvard’s school of public health has not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment about the clarification added to the study or the criticisms levelled against the research.
The study only notes an association between pollution and the virus, which originated in China, according to Stanley Young, a member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board.
“This is the proverbial butterfly in China causing a tornado in Alabama, and generally the world doesn’t work that way,” Young, a statistician, told the Washington Examiner.
“The paper is written in a way that strongly implies cause and effect,” he said before saying the study’s authors “could have been a lot more circumspect than that.”
Environmentalists believe President Donald Trump’s environmental rollbacks could lead to more deaths on this front. The EPA relaxed Obama-era rules, reversing the legal underpinning of mercury limits for coal-fired plants, as well as proposed to keep levels for limits on fine particle pollution.
The virus has killed nearly 24,000 in New York and more than 67,000 across the country.
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As Pat Frank pointed out earlier this is a “snapshot” study that is useless for projecting anything. Consider an alternative: All fossil fuel burning is immediately banned. Three months later the death rate has soared to unbelievable levels. Conclusion? Clean air is deadly. It causes starvation and mass murder. It causes infant mortality to rise by 80% and it causes lifespans to fall from teh 70’s to the 20’s.
This is the kind of result that you get from mathematicians and statisticians who only look at numbers wth absolutely no understanding of the reality behind them. It’s psuedo-science based on models that do nothing but number matching.
Interesting how they assume it must be PM2.5, and not one of the hundreds of other “pollutants” that are also present.
Particulate Emissions – is the proposed ban on private Diesel cars Useless?
Bristol is set to become the first UK city to ban diesel cars in a bid to improve air quality. Under the plans, all privately owned diesel vehicles will be barred from entering a clean air zone in the city centre every day between 7am and 3pm by March 2021.
YET, and without computer models.
Comparisons of Particulate emissions before and after UK Lockdown suggest that motor vehicles are not the problem as there is very little change before and after despite a near 80% reduction in vehicle movements in Bristol.
See
https://adriankerton.wordpress.com/070-bristol-temple-way-emissions/
Well I do seem to recall that Bristol is fairly close to th Bristol Channel, and that prevailing winds will tend to be from offshore. One of the largest sources of pm2.5 is salt spray from the sea, which probably has a beneficial effect, as salt with a bit of moisture still present is likely to stick to any actual particulate pollution, and deposit the clumps on surfaces. Any salt breathed into the lungs will simply dissolve in the mucus, so is at worst benign. Really defining particles as pollution without considering what the particle is does not make sense. Next they will be telling us that an innocuous gas such as CO2 is a pollutant 🙂
I do remember some time ago, that Steve Malloy [ junkscience.com ] exposed human experiments by the EPA and a couple of Ivy League universities where they pump ‘straight’ diesel exhaust into their subjects none of whom died from PM2.5 … one old lady had existing respiratory and heart issues ans had to go to hospital.
The increase in galactic radiation can be considered as air pollution because the number of mutations in nature will increase.
More models, more assumptions, more opinions and the same flimsy “could lead to” assertions. People read that stuff and take it seriously. And they never ask if there is even a smidgen of factual evidence behind those claims. Thats how it works in the green mafia. Goebbels would have been proud of such subversive propaganda.
I think that scientists are trained to give the cure for covid-19, but we must be very clear that a cure could not be possible until September, since a series of steps must be taken, such as animal testing, to see that it works in them. after that see the perfect or balanced amount to then be tested on humans and see the reactions in them, the best cure now is the voluntary quarantine in my mind.