The Medical Absurdity of Scott Pruitt’s Transparent Only Research
Scott Pruitt is the Trump Administrator of the EPA. He is backed by oilman Harold Hamm, the richest man in Oklahoma. I have no illusions that his actions are his alone, since they are fully backed by Trump in his complete sellout to the oil industry, and to any polluting industry, for that matter. While Pruitt has been groomed as Oklahoma Attorney General to be the most effective industry shark, he could be easily replaced by many more. For example, Trump’s legislative liaison, Marc Short, was the legislative liaison for the Koch brothers.
Pruitt has banned medical studies of the effects of pollution from EPA advisories. He has done this under a standard right-wing attack: since the medical studies involve confidentiality, they therefore lack “transparency”. The absurdity of this is that ALL medical and pharmaceutical studies also have confidentiality, and therefore lack “transparency”. If all Health and Human Services, NIH, medical journals, medical equipment companies, hospitals, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, and etc., banned confidential studies, the US medical system would be back in the days of snake oil salesmen and bloodletting. This is where Pruitt is going to return OUR Environmental Protection Agency. It is OUR agency, not his personal one, or one that belongs to any polluting industry!
This will only change when we replace a heavily polluting industry lobbied Republican Congress with a Democratic one, which is also responsive to the voters, and not the lobbyists.
The Republican Congress is clearly standing on the edge of a contradiction. While the entire medical and pharmaceutical industry is lobbying for funding for medical and pharmaceutical trials, which are necessarily confidential, and the current budget has been increased in these areas, the Congress is allowing OUR health to be corrupted through the EPA, while ruling out such studies.
We have to get rid of the FLIMFLAM Congress that is selling us EPA snake oil.
