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Reuters NewMedia - Monday, January 27, 2003
Maggie Fox
They fear the appointments are politically motivated and meant to delay decision-making affecting controversial areas such as the environment, abortion and workplace safety.
Administration officials say they are merely looking for diverse views and accuse the critics themselves of playing politics.
One potential appointee, marketing consultant and HIV patient Jerry Thacker, withdrew his name on Thursday after wide media coverage of controversy surrounding his nomination.
Thacker, asked to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, was attacked by AIDS and gay rights groups for his characterization of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a "gay plague" and homosexuality as a "deathstyle."
Thacker, who caught the virus from his wife, is an outspoken Christian who has written about his plight. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer distanced Bush from Thacker, saying the president did not agree with Thacker's views.
Some researchers complain the Thacker case is an extreme example of an ongoing issue with the Bush administration.
"Science policy that affects public health should be above party politics, and seen to be so," the Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, said in an editorial. "Expert committees need to be filled, by definition, with experts."
Some of the controversial appointees have been evangelical Christians, but the Lancet said religion was not the issue.
"This is not to decry faith in medicine," according to the editorial. "The perfect role model is C. Everett Koop, US surgeon-general (from) 1981 to 1989, a devout Christian, and who maintained credibility by remaining impartial, especially in sensitive areas such as women's health and AIDS," it said.
CONSULTANTS FOR INDUSTRY
One appointee cited by critics is Dr. William Banner, a professor of pediatrics and expert in toxicology at the University of Oklahoma who has also consulted for the lead industry in at least one lead injury lawsuit. Dr. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and former assistant Environmental Protection Agency administrator who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health, said consultants to industry regularly serve on panels, but she and others felt Banner had extreme views.
"Scientific advisory committees are a very important forum where people strip away their stakeholder consensuses," Goldman said. "If you attempt to pre-empt this process...by selecting people who, ahead of time, have a very strong point of view...then you are discrediting the process."
Dana Loomis, a professor at the University of North Carolina who chairs an occupational safety panel, complained in a letter to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) that one new nominee to the panel, Laura Purnett of the University of Massachusetts, was rejected because she had publicly supported a workplace ergonomics standard that Bush repealed last year.
"Every administration makes political appointments. But the role of a scientific advisory committee is quite different," David Michaels, a former assistant energy secretary who teaches environmental health at George Washington University, told reporters this week.
Michaels said he saw "a consistent pattern of putting people in who assure the administration will hear what it wants to hear."
The critics agree it is hard to show that such appointees will change the outcome of any panel's deliberations. "It is hard to draw the line and it is hard to find evidence," Michael admitted.
"It isn't that we object to having a variety of views in science," said Martin Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, who has worked in both science and industry. "It is that if we are seeking advice, it should be from the best possible quality of scientists who aren't carrying any other baggage with them."
Michaels said the goal is not to change the outcome of a committee's vote, but to tangle up the decision-making process. "What these committees will do now is essentially throw their hands up and say the science is uncertain," he said.
"That sort of paralysis is dangerous."
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