Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

MIT Historian Alleges United Nations & Scientific Cover-Up Of True Death & Disease Toll From Chernobyl

My latest column @Forbes — please share!

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@Forbes 1. A new book by a historian from the Massachusetts of Technology alleges that scientists & officials at United Nations, the Red Cross, and World Health Organization covered up evidence that hundreds of thousands of people died from radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

@Forbes 2. If the allegations in "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" are correct, then its author, Kate Brown, will have successfully overturned the scientific consensus that the Chernobyl accident will, at most, result in the deaths of just 200 people.

@Forbes 3. “International scientists suppressed evidence of a cancer epidemic among children, sidelined scientists who did not submit,” Brown alleges, “because they had much larger radioactive skeletons in the closet from nuclear bomb tests.”

@Forbes 4. Brown’s book has been positively reviewed by journalists & historians for Science, Nature, the Economist & the Times of London, who reported on the book’s findings as a factual without interviewing, citing or quoting any of the scientists who were the subject of Brown’s book.

@Forbes 5. The reviewer for @TheEconomist
@NoahSneider the magazine’s Moscow bureau chief, even emailed Brown to say, “I wanted to write you directly to say that it's absolutely magnificent. An eye-opening, awe-inspiring tale. One of the best books I've read on any topic recently. Bravo”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 6. Brown alleges that scientists were motivated to cover-up the true public health impact of Chernobyl because, if the true impacts of radioactive fall-out were known, nuclear-armed nations would be forced to admit that people were poisoned and killed by nuclear weapons testing.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 7. “Minimizing both the number of deaths so far and the on-going health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster provided cover for nuclear powers to dodge lawsuits and uncomfortable investigations in the 1990s,” writes Brown.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 8. The reviewer for Science repeats Brown’s claims, writing “Admitting that the symptoms & diseases being documented in Ukraine & Belarus were related to Chernobyl radiation could put the United States, France, & the United Kingdom on the line for billions of dollars of payouts.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 9. A major review of the science by the United Nations shows that humans are exposed to 200 times more naturally-occurring radiation in their food than from the fallout from weapons testing.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 10. Brown claims tens of thousands or more were killed. “That range of 35,000 to 150,000 Chernobyl fatalities — not 54 — is the minimum.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 11. She argues that “scientific administrators” in “UN agencies… drew from a well-known toolbox of tactics familiar from controversies surrounding lead, tobacco, and chemical toxins.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 12. The award-winning historian stresses “the suppression of the record of catastrophic damage in the Chernobyl territories” which she says includes cancers and “diseases of the blood-forming system, digestive tract, and endocrine, reproductive, circulatory, and nervous systems.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 13. In a phone interview, Brown told me, "I’m not asking people to believe me. I’m not the scientist who has done the work. I’m just pulling out of the archives what Soviet scientists, mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians, five years after the accident."

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 14. In fact, Brown's book argues not only that the whole of mainstream science surrounding Chernobyl is wrong, but so too is the mainstream science regarding the health impacts of radiation.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 15. Brown ends her book by calling for a sweeping reassessment of the impact of low levels of radiation on health including from “medical procedures, nuclear power reactors and their accidents, and atomic bombs their fallout. Few people on earth have escaped those exposures.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 16. Brown claims nuclear weapons testing fallout resulted in a rise in thyroid cancers, childhood cancers, and declining sperm counts among men all around the world, from Europe to the U.S. to Australia.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 17. “In the name of ‘peace’ and ‘deterrence,’ military leaders aged global nuclear war,” she writes. “The period of nuclear testing qualifies as the most unhinged, suicidal chapter in human history," which would make it more deadly than World War II, which resulted in 50M deaths

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 18. The world’s leading radiation scientists, most of whom are independent academics who have studied the Chernobyl accident for the last four decades, strongly dispute Brown’s claims, and point to hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers endorsed by UN and other agencies.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 19. “I don’t think Kate Brown has ever sat on an IAEA or UNSCEAR committee – I have,” wrote Dr. Geraldine Thomas, professor of pathology at Imperial College-London and founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 20. Scientists representing the UN and others all came to the same conclusion: the vast majority of harm they witnessed was from poverty, dislocation, and mental health problems created by fears of radiation. “The Red Cross sounded almost exactly like the UN,” Brown laments.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 21. “It is just not true that the scientists try to minimize the effects of radiation,” Thomas said. “ It would be against their own interests. Academics are required to produce large amounts of money for their Institutes...

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 22. "You would be expecting them to argue for larger effects of radiation as the more serious the health consequences the more the money flows."

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 23. Why would scientists cover up evidence that low doses of radiation are harmful, I asked Brown

“A lot of people zip in for a couple of weeks,” Brown told me, “& they talk to people for a couple of weeks & get datasets others have collected & then go back and run the numbers”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 24. I asked Thomas if that was how she worked.

"I have worked with Ukrainian scientists for the last 35 years," Thomas said, "visited Ukraine on many occasions, including once 6 weeks after a Caesarian section for my second child, which think shows how committed I am."

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 25. “I have a longstanding commitment to Ukraine,” Thomas wrote in an email, “and if the scientists we work with thought there was anything that needed to be brought to our attention — and that would potentially provide more funding — they would have mentioned it”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 26. “The fact is that the majority of the scientists out there are extremely dedicated individuals who understand that everything has to be evidence-based. If they had good scientific evidence of the things that Kate claims they would be telling us all about it.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 27. What about all of the birth defects, like the child in the photo that the Times of London ran with the review of Brown’s book? “I don’t doubt that children were born with birth defects,” wrote Thomas, “unfortunately this occurs everywhere."

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 28. “The issue here is attribution,” said Thomas. “In order to attribute an effect to exposure you have to have a baseline with which to compare it & then take into account increased ascertainment – and the method by which you screen can increase that ascertainment hugely.”

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 29. I asked Brown for evidence that Chernobyl radiation led to an increase in birth defects. She sent me three documents, all by the same scientist, Wladimir Wertelecki. One was published as a chapter of a book edited by the anti-nuclear activist, Helen Caldicott.

@Forbes @TheEconomist @NoahSneider 30. The other two were published in Congential Anomalies (impact factor: 1.1) and the other in Birth Defects Research (impact factor: 1.6).

“We did not prove with this study that radiation causes birth defects,” Wertelecki admits.

31. The evidence that Chernobyl radiation increased thyroid cancer is far stronger, but “only around 25 percent of all the cases can be attributed to radiation,” explains Thomas.

32. What about the increase in thyroid cancers, which Brown claims are from weapons testing? Most of the “increase” is from better detection methods. There's “no evidence” that it came from radiation. More plausible factors are changes to iodine intake, chem. exposure & obesity

33. Brown relies heavily on a scientist named Yury Bandazhevsky, whose research finds “that although ambient levels of radioactivity have decreased over the years, the rate of health problems has continued to rise among children born to exposed parents.”

34. Says Thomas, “his papers are not peer-reviewed……. Kate seems to have taken the views of the ‘usual suspects’ into account, but dismisses mainstream science where there is peer review, and accountability..."

35. "The 'usual suspects' tell a good story," said Thomas, "but without a shred of evidence from studies that are appropriately powered and controlled for confounders. Unfortunately, most of science, when done properly, is pretty boring – maybe that’s the problem.”

36. Indeed, Oxford University’s Martin School conducted a major review of the health impacts of low levels of radiation and wrote critically about the supposedly scientific sources Brown relies upon in Manual for Survival.

37. “It is untrue that we just look at average doses & don't consider various pathways of uptake to people,” said James Smith of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of Portsmouth, who wrote a long critique in Journal of Radiological Protection of Brown’s book

38. “There are hundreds of papers on this including many on uptake to mushrooms, berries, private milk production etc in natural and semi-natural ecosystems" Smith said. "In the 1990's there was even an EU project devoted just to semi-natural ecosystems."

39. “Kate may not be aware of this, but there is a whole journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry devoted to the science of dosimetry and hundreds (probably thousands) of other papers across the scientific literature,” Smith explained.

40. Thomas agreed. “There have been many very careful studies conducted at huge expense over many years and it is a shame that she dismisses these and concentrates on contentious studies carried out by others that are not highly regarded within their own community.”

41. Brown points out that there was some initial skepticism among some scientists that there would even be a rise in the rate of thyroid cancer, the only cancer that rose after Chernobyl, according to the mainstream, U.N.-endorsed science.

42. But Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, said, “Those of us who worked on the animal models of thyroid cancer weren’t surprised, we knew all about the supersensitivity of the developing thyroid to 131-I.”

43. I asked Brown what explained why her view was so different from that of scientists like Smith. “Jim is a real stalwart for an older view that you can have low doses and that they can even sometimes be good for you and that in general they are not harmful,” said Brown.

44. Smith rejected Brown’s accusation. “I've never said radiation isn't at all harmful and am not a proponent of radiation hormesis,” wrote Smith.

45. I pressed Brown to square her account with the work of scientists like Thomas.

Brown replied, “There’s a debate going on, right! Between the Gerry Thomas and Jim Smiths and… You could call Helen Caldicott!”

46. What, in the end, explains why so many doctors in Ukraine and Belarus thought they were seeing evidence of radiation impacting health?

47. “There were huge social changes taking place in the former Soviet Union that have affected the disease landscape,” explained Thomas, “and that is a significant confounder in all that she claims.”

48. Indeed, Brown describes people living difficult, impoverished lives doing things like drinking vodka during the day & burning wood for fuel.

According to the World Health Organization, breathing smoke from wood and biomass kills 3.8 million people every year.

49. Studies find that living a large polluted city increases mortality risk 2.8 times more than being a Chernobyl clean-up worker

50. WHO calls the “psycho-social impacts” the “main public health impact” & noted “Chernobyl-affected populations had anxiety levels twice as high as non-exposed population and were more likely to report multiple unexplained physical symptoms and subjective poor health."

51. WHO singled out local doctors for spreading fear.

“To some extent, these symptoms were driven by the belief that their health was adversely affected by the disaster and the fact that they were diagnosed by a physician with a ‘Chernobyl-related health problem.’”

52. In the end, Brown claims that the evidence collected and assembled by Greenpeace is more reliable than the evidence collected by hundreds of scientists working under the auspices of the UN and other international agencies.

53. “Greenpeace employees came to respect the work of local doctors, which they had first overlooked,” she writes. “Greenpeace became an important clearinghouse to collate and translate work of local scientists not known abroad.”

54. Brown’s book, which rests on their testimony, largely does the same, though cracks in her narrative occasionally allow different voices to shine through
A man hired by Greenpeace told Brown that he “found basically healthy children ‘but a very sick medical care system’”

/END