Elizabeth Whelan

From SourceWatch

Elizabeth Whelan is president and a founder of the American Council on Science and Health.

According to a biographical note in a 2002 report that she co-authored, "she holds masters and doctoral degrees in public health from the Yale School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health. The records show a Master in Public Health (MPH) Yale University School of Medicine in 1967, a Master of Science, Harvard School of Public Health in 1968, and an Sc.D at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1971. She stayed on after 1971 as an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Nutrition, which means that she was supported entirely by external grants, most from large corporations or trade associations.

During these years at the Harvard School of Public Health, she joined forces with Dr Frederick Stare who had established and organised the funding of his own chair (Now called the Frederick J Stare Chair of Nutrition)-- by food, chemical and pharmacy industries. And in 1975 they began a long and highly profitable partnership - jointly writing a number of books and running a syndicated radio program "Healthline".

• Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ^[1]

Contents 1 Stare 2 Whelan and AIHC 3 ACSH 4 External links 4.1 Articles by Whelan 4.2 General Articles 5 Resources and articles 5.1 Related Sourcewatch articles 5.2 References

Stare

Stare himself was a part-owner and director of the Continental Can Co. (a family business) and with his extensive family connections he had attracted support from the food and chemical industries to establish his chair. He soon became well known as the promoter of food additives, chemicals, and sugar, and was scornful of any claim to the contrary -- constantly attacked the health food industry, and actively sought media exposure to ridicule 'cancerphobia'. [1] This was the same cry that Whelan later took up.

From 1954 on, he also actively sought tobacco industry money to expand his empire. By 1959 Stare personally (and also his department) was acting as a conduit for tobacco industry funds (about $100,000 pa). This money was secretly funneled via lawyers through the HSPH system to a number of Harvard biomedical scientists and epidemiologists, including the notorious Carl C. Seltzer.[2] These academics and scientists:

• provide witness (at court cases and before Congress, etc.) and,
• analysed reports (finding exploitable gaps in other scientific reports) for the tobacco industry. When questioned they all claimed to be "independent academics".

Seltzer himself regularly claimed that he "had never taken a penny from the tobacco industry", which was correct. It had all been channelled through the lawyers Shook, Hardy and Bacon, then sent to Stare's Nutritional Foundation bank account, before being passed on to Seltzer (after a "management fee" had been subtracted).[3]

They were able to expoit the Harvard name and maintain they had "never taken a penny from the industry" without fear of prosecution, because this last statement was correct; the money had all come from lawyers, and it was passed to them via Stare's department, which theoretically decided what research would be done.

After constant claims about his Department's funding sources, on January 28, 1972, Stare made a written public statement which said:

"I don't recall that any individual tobacco company has ever contributed any money directly to the department." [4]

These were weasel words intended to deceive: he was himself a recipient of a couple of tobacco grants from the joint tobacco industry body (via the secret CTR (Council for Tobacco Research) Special Account #4 held by a Kansas City law firm), and his department systematically laundered payments for the notorious Dr Carl Seltzer and a half-dozen other Harvard scientists, for a couple of decades. [5]

In mid 1973, Stare was exposed as a scientific lobbyist for the food, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies by Harvard students in the campus magazine (The Present Illness),(See student magazine claims about Stare: page 19-20 [6]) and also at the same time the student body attacked the support being given to the university scientists by the tobacco industry. Dr Gary Huber, and a couple of other Medical faculty members were eventually driven out of the university, but Seltzer, Stare and many others survived.

Whelan and AIHC

In October 1977, Elizabeth Whelan was working on scientific public relations for the Chemical Manufacturers Association while still retaining her position at Harvard. For CMA's offshoot SOCMA (Synthetic Organic Chemical Manfacturers Association) she began a new subsidiary organisation called the American Industrial Health Council (AIHC) which was nominally led by Paul E Oreffice, President of Dow Chemicals. This organisation coordinated industry responses to government regulations, and promoted a series of industry-set criteria for regulating potentially cancerous materials in the environment.

Whelan was judged to be highly successful in her political lobbying. However, the tobacco industry loathed her because she was deflecting all blame for chemically induced cancer rates to the more visible problem of smoking. [7]

These early scientific-manipulation activities of the chemical industry were part of an organised reaction to Rachael Carson's "Silent Spring" published in 1962. The Chemical Manufacturer's Association (CMA) quickly realised that it must organise science and lobbying efforts; it had to discredit scientific research and attack the environmental activists if it were to maintan profits and keep free of government oversight and regulation.

For many years, most of the CMA's propaganda and lobbying was conducted through PR firm E Bruce Harrison (taken over by Hill & Knowlton), but gradually the AIHC and ACSH took over and played a very important part, especially with the gullible media.

Also at this time, the chemical industry and the tobacco industry were trying to blame each other for the rapid increase in the rate of cancers. So the strategy adopted by the SOCMA and the AIHC was to blame tobacco smoke (correctly) as the major cause of cancer in smokers and non-smokers, while attempting to exonerate (incorrectly) environmental products like asbestos, preservatives and pesticides.

Whelan soon made herself a name as "consumer advocate" on radio and in the TV by vigorously attacking smoking and the tobacco industry. Very soon she was a television celebrity who was toasted by activist groups opposed to smoking. It was the perfect camoflage.

Quite probably she is a genuine anti-tobacco activist. But from 1973 she become a full-time partner with Stare in a number of enterprises, and she cannot have been unaware of his close connections to Seltzer and the tobacco industry, or his mentoring of tobacco scientists and his deals with chemical and food companies. Some of her Harvard School of Public Health associates worked virtually full time for the tobacco industry and appeared in public enquires on behalf of the industry.

ACSH

In mid 1978 Whelan and Stare founded the American Council for Science and Health, with Whelan taking the front position as "Executive Director" and Stare assuming the role of Deputy. He tended to keep his head down when she attacked the tobacco industry. Whelan's husband Steven provided the legal backup through his law firm, Thacher, Proffitt and Wood.

A number of professional science-lobbyists were coopted to form an "Advisory Council" for ACSH (they, presumably, were able to use their connections financially). Many more genuine, but gullible, scientists from around the world were suckered into joining as members by signing a "motherhood statement" about the need for "sound science". ACSH was funded by the same corporations which supported Stare's Nutrition Department for so many years -- and over time it became the model for Steve Milloy's notorious TASSC ("The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition") "scientific grassroots organisation" which differed only in the fact that it included tobacco lobbying, while being supported by the same corporate funders from chemicals and food industries. (Philip Morris had bought Kraft/General Foods and RJ Reynolds Tobacco had bought Nabisco).

Almost the only group which did not accept ACSH as a genuine "association of concerned scientist" was Ralph Nader's Center for Science in the Public Interest which branded it "a consumer fraud" and an industry front group. They exposed the fact that its Advisory Board has many industry lobbyists, and that its reports were loaded with errors. However, the media has generally ignored these warnings and treated ACSH as a genuine scientific grassroots organisation until recently.

Whelan and ACSH's reputation was made (and finances assured) mainly by her successful propaganda win over the activists in the Alar scare (a hormone sprayed on Apples). This campaign was funded $25,000 p.a. by Uniroyal (the manufacturer of Alar) and by most of the other SOCMA members, including Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and Union Carbide, who made large contributions. Then in 1990 the apple and chemical industries filed a libel lawsuit against the activists over publicising Alar's dangers, and lost the suit. The court concluded that the scientific case against Alar was justified. Uniroyal itself later admitted the chemical was dangerous and voluntarily took it off the US market (but continued to sell it elsewhere).

Whelan is the author or co-author of over two dozen books mainly devoted to supporting the food and chemical industry by promoting the idea that fears about additives, colourings, and preservatives are the result of media sensationalism which has generated "cancerphobia":

• Panic in the Pantry
• Preventing Cancer
• Toxic Terror
• A Smoking Gun - How the Tobacco Industry Gets Away with Murder

External links

Articles by Whelan

• Elizabeth Whelan, "Blackballing sections of the science community: The new US protocol that says scientists with corporate connections are unfit to judge drug safety smacks of modern-day McCarthyism", Spiked-online, April 1, 2005.
• Elizabeth M. Whelan, "Are sodas the new cigarettes?", Washington Times, March 16, 2006.
• Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, "Intellectual Conservative", Intellectual Conservative, May 31, 2006.

General Articles

• Bonner Cohen, et al., ed., "The Fear Profiteers: Do 'Socially Responsible' Businesses Sow Health Scares to Reap Monetary Rewards?", February 2002.

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

References

1. ↑ Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, accessed September 19, 2008.