by Valerie Richardson
The Washington Times
Harvard researchers publicly walked back Monday a key finding in a highly touted but hotly contested paper linking air pollution exposure to deaths from the novel coronavirus, slashing the estimated mortality rate in half.
The preliminary study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health made a splash when the results were announced April 7 in The New York Times, prompting alarm on the left as Democrats sought to connect COVID-19 deaths to the Trump administration’s regulatory pushback.
A few weeks later, however, its researchers quietly backtracked from their finding that people who live for decades in areas with slightly more particulate matter in the air are 15% more likely to die from the coronavirus, lowering the figure to 8%. The press release was revised Monday…
JunkScience’s Steve Milloy said the Harvard paper is “not just junk science, it’s scientific fraud.”
“There is no biological data to support the notion that air quality in any way affects the outcome of coronavirus infection — and the researchers know it,” Mr. Milloy said.
