by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Legal Fellow
As Appearing in the Washington Times

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is trying to use the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to cover-up the agency’s illegal science experiments on humans.

Four years ago I broke the story in this paper that the EPA was conducting illegal toxicity experiments on human beings. In short, the EPA intentionally exposed hundreds of humans in a gas chamber to exceedingly high levels of air pollutants like diesel exhaust, soot and smog in hopes of causing serious health effects that the agency could point to as justification for its costly and stringent outdoor air quality standards. Study subjects included the elderly (up to age 80), asthmatics, diabetics and people with heart disease — the very people EPA claims are most susceptible to air pollution. EPA failed to tell these study subjects it believed the experiments could cause death.

The experiments were fundamentally unethical and illegal as federal law prohibits treating humans as guinea pigs, especially for the mere purpose of advancing an agency’s regulatory agenda. Extra illegality was added by the agency’s failure to inform its human guinea pigs that it believed the experiments could kill them.

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