President Trump is trying to save money by terminating leases on facilities used by federal agencies. One of these is EPA’s Human Studies Facility located at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Scientists are trying to save it,” reports Nature magazine. But being a waste of money is the least interesting aspect of the infamous lab.
In 2011, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I exposed the lab’s illegal experimentation on humans with air pollutants that EPA considers to be deadly. The lab’s central feature is an actual gas chamber into which EPA pumped exhaust from a diesel truck idling outside in a parking lot. You can see a photo of the twisted arrangement here.
After filtering out the carbon monoxide, EPA concentrated the exhaust’s fine particulate matter (soot, called “PM2.5” by EPA) to unrealistically high levels and pumped it into the chamber in which human guinea pigs inhaled it for periods of two hours. The purpose of the experiments was to observe the effects, if any, of inhaling PM2.5. For these experiments, EPA had recruited: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and elderly persons up to 80 years of age. EPA paid its human guinea pigs as much as a couple thousand dollars for their participation in the experiments.
All this may seem harmless enough. But was it? EPA had previously concluded that PM2.5 was, essentially, the most toxic substance known to man. Any inhalation could cause death within hours, the agency had determined. It had also stated that the people most at risk from inhaling PM2.5 were: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and the elderly. Those at risk from PM2.5 were the very sort of people upon whom it had been experimenting.
But EPA had not disclosed any of this to, and so did not obtain legally required “informed consent” from its human guinea pigs. Instead of informing its human guinea pigs in writing that the agency believed the experiments could kill them, as was required by federal regulations, state law and the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, the agency’s consent forms only disclosed that some temporary coughing or wheezing may result from the experiments.
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Upon learning of the horrific experiments, a group to which I belonged sued the agency in federal court to stop them. The documents filed by EPA in response to our lawsuit revealed some shocking facts and admissions.
In an affidavit filed with the court, an EPA employee stated that he verbally warned the human guinea pigs: “There is a possibility you may die from this [experiment].” Although such important information would have had to be disclosed, and consent obtained in writing (versus merely verbally), it has simply been illegal since the discovery of the Nazi concentration camp research to risk human lives in non-therapeutic medical experiments. Conducting experiments for the purpose of issuing regulations clearly falls outside of that exception.
In the Department of Justice memorandum filed on behalf of the agency, EPA made the shocking admissionthat, in fact, the science (i.e., epidemiology studies) that it relied on to conclude that PM2.5 was deadly, wasn’t actually sufficient scientifically for making its PM2.5 claims. In fact, the reason the EPA was conducting the human experiments, it admitted, was to develop biological evidence or plausibility to back up the lethality of PM2.5 it told the public the epidemiology studies indicated. This meant that EPA was trying to harm (kill?) the patients to back up its mere hypothesis about the lethality of PM2.5.
Fortunately for EPA, it could also admit that no one had been harmed by PM2.5 in its experiments, which failed to elicit a cough or a wheeze among the hundreds of allegedly “vulnerable” human guinea pigs it tried to harm.
The court eventually dismissed our lawsuit for lack of standing, not on the merits. It ruled that only the human guinea pigs could bring such a lawsuit, a bizarre outcome since EPA had lied to them about what it was doing in the first place. But EPA’s conduct had been exposed to the world and the agency was shamed into halting the illegal experiments. The agency tried to rehabilitate itself with subsequent white wash investigations by its own Inspector General and the National Academy of Sciences. But neither effort was successful.
Fast forward to today and there have been real world consequences to EPA’s illegal experiments and the Trump EPA must address them to implement its deregulatory agenda.
PM2.5 has been the most powerful regulatory weapon of the Clinton, Obama and Biden EPAs. The Obama-Biden and, later, the Biden-Harris war-on-coal air quality rules for greenhouse gases and mercury emissions all actually depend on the validity of its PM2.5 claims. Just this week, the Trump EPA announced it was going to roll back those two rules.
When first issued by the Obama and Biden EPAs, the regulations couldn’t survive a standard cost-benefit analysis with respect to greenhouse gas or mercury emissions. To make the rules politically defensible cost-benefit-wise, the agency claimed that by reducing coal plant greenhouse gas and mercury emissions, the new rules would also reduce emissions of PM2.5. Given that EPA had claimed that PM2.5 killed about 570,000 Americans per year and the agency valued each death $10 million, there has been no regulatory cost that could balance, much less overcome, the claimed benefits of the rules.
But EPA’s PM2.5 claims were all lies. We now know that because of the illegal human experiments and our lawsuit. Closing the infamous lab is great start. But the EPA should apply the results of the human experiments controversy to shut down the EPA’s many PM2.5-based regulatory abuses.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.