Berthold Schneider
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This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation. |
Berthold Schneider was a German Biostatistician who worked extensively for the tobacco industry. (See 1989 Hannover, Germany)
In February 1995 the new CEO of Philip Morris, Geoffrey C Bible took control of the tobacco industry's main fightback program and completely reformed the organisational structure of the company's lobbying and disinformation activities. Philip Morris virtually dominated the global tobacco industry's fightback program at this time and he realised that the problem had become global, rather than being confined to just the developed world.
Bible therefor merged the active lobbying/scientific-witness arms of both the domestic (PM USA) company and the international (PMI) division (with many national companies) and creating three new, closely-linked headquarter entities.
- Corporate Affairs (CA) now ran the main disinformation campaigns, and they looked after the 'grants' and 'donations' given to think-tanks and university institutions which housed scientific lobbyists for the industry.
- Worldwide Scientific Affairs (WSA) took over the old Science & Technology/Scientific Affairs operations. It now controlled the many academic and scientific consultants that had been recruited around the world: the open/admitted advisers who were paid by annual retainers; those who received grants and were open about it while always claiming to be "independent" of tobacco influence; and the numerous WhiteCoats who preferred to operate in secret, and were generally paid only on a services-rendered basis. WhiteCoats were usually paid through their own private consultancy firms, or via pseudo-scientific associations (IAPAG, ARIA, EGIL, IAI, ARTIST etc.) set up specifically to provide a money-laundry service and cover.
- Worldwide Regulatory Affairs (WRA), was an extension of the old Washington lobbyist in-house staff, but with experts in other countries, and now operating on a global scale. They did the political lobbying and wrote the wording of the bills. The were mainly lawyers.
As part of this restructure, the head office of the company requested information about the scientists who had been recruited and run over the previous few years by the regional divisions of the company. This document from the Swiss branch run by Helmut Gaisch and Helmut Reif gives us their evaluation of some of their contractors. See original document: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/acs36b00/pdf.
Prof Berthold Schneider, Hannover
- Advisor to the German Government on medicants.
- [Note: His value was mainly in his contacts at the top level of the German Health ministry.]
- Used by PM and the tobacco industry for checking mortality and survival models. Writing Letters-to-the-editor; Organised a statistical workshop at Hannover University.
- [He had retired from Hannover University by this time, and he did odds-and-sods work for them -- like running symposiums and writing letters-to-the-editor for payment]
- Current work for PM: Presentation at the European Forum Alpbach/Public Health Seminar on the pitfalls of epidemiology. On-going work to publish statistical conference proceedings; reviews statistical papers if needed.
- [The Alpbach Forum was a regular public health-lecture event];
- Paid $14,000 in 1997, budgeted for $20,000 in 1998.
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