Trevor Butterworth

Trevor Butterworth is former fellow at a defunct corporate front group called Statistical Assessment Service and the current Executive Director for Sense About Science USA. Reporters with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Butterworth was an "impassioned defender" of the chemical BPA who "regularly combs the Internet for stories about BPA and offers comments without revealing his ties to industry." The Intercept reported that Butterworth's defense of the chemical industry has "reverberated across an echo chamber of free-market organizations, including Philip Morris’s product defense law firm, Koch-funded think tanks, chemical and food-packaging industry trade groups in Europe and the U.S., and an ostensibly neutral environmental health research foundation run by a chemical industry PR firm." Butterworth has also defended the soda industry against taxes and sought to create disinformation that is beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry.

CHEMICAL INDUSTRY DEFENDER

Reporting duo Meg Kissinger and Susanne Rust led a four month investigation of the chemical industry's attempts to delay regulation of BPA. In one story they noted that Trevor Butterworth was part of a "stealth public relations campaign" to defend the chemical industry. In one instance, they uncovered a 2006 article in Chemical Week magazine where Butterworth explained his thinking: "Companies need to develop a public information policy that is proactive in educating the public and tackling the claims of activist groups in real time," Butterworth said. "Most of the companies are like a deer in the headlights, and traditional PR is useless in dealing with these problems."

Kissinger and Rust won a George Polk Award for this reporting on BPA.

Reporting on BPA in 2008, the Washington Post's Annys Shinn wrote that the FDA “ignored scientific evidence and used flawed methods when it determined that a chemical widely used in baby bottles and in the lining of cans is not harmful” Trevor Butterworth called the story “a pre-emptive attack on the credibility of the scientific review by members of its oversight board.” In 2009, Consumers Union released a report finding BPA in several canned foods. STATS told NBC Nightly News that “today's Consumer Union research is seriously flawed, the risk overstated.” When Mariah Blake broke a story in Mother Jones about FDA corruption regarding BPA, Butterworth referred to the article as part of “the never-ending chemical scare story of the 21st century.”

For The Intercept, Liza Gross wrote that Butterworth published a 27,000-word investigation sharply questioning the validity of the scientific studies and news reports about BPA’s health effects, and that the Statistical Assessment Service had ties to the tobacco industry through an affiliated nonprofit. In 2017, European chemicals agency (Echa) voted unanimously that bisphenol A (BPA) was an endocrine disruptor linking it to a range of hormone-twisting health effects including cancer, learning difficulties and diabetes.

Butterworth has also defended DuPont, stating that charge PFOA is dangerous is a type of "antiscience". When legislators sought to ban pthalates, Butterworth wrote that it was "a classic case of bad environmentalism." Butterworth's colleague Rebecca Goldin has also defended pthalates.

DEFENDING THE SODA INDUSTRY

The Statistical Assessment Service hosted an entire webpage devoted to undermining the science linking sodas with obesity while attacking the benefits of taxing soda that was written by Trevor Butterworth and edited by Rebecca Goldin.

Research from UCLA has found a direct link between soda and obesity. Trevor Butterworth later ridiculed the future director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for writing in the New England Journal of Medicine that "a penny-per-ounce excise tax could reduce consumption of sugared sodas by more than 10%." Butterworth also denigrated a tax on sodas that was being considered by NYC, writing for Forbes that "the ban is unlikely to have any impact on obesity—and even if it does, it will be too small to be measurable or, rather, won’t be measured at all. The evidence that soda has been the lead driver of the obesity epidemic is larded with assertion rather than hard data."

NPR reported that the World Health Organization urged countries to tax sodas. Dr. Douglas Bettcher, director of the WHO's Department for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases, says that "consumption of free sugars, including products like sugary drinks, is a major factor in the global increase of people suffering from obesity and diabetes." Blecher stated, "If governments tax products like sugary drinks, they can reduce suffering and save lives. They can also cut healthcare costs and increase revenues to invest in health services." Researchers at UCLA later confirmed the importance of a soda tax, writing, "Educating people to drink fewer sugar-sweetened beverages only works to a point. After that, taxation on an unhealthy product — along with putting those taxes toward public health programs — would help far more.”

When research began to show that diet soda might not help with weight loss, Trevor attacked researcher Susan Swithers, a psychologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Yale Cardiologist Harlan Krumholz wrote that he would no longer drink diet sodas because they may disturb metabolism and cause weight gain. Krumholz also wrote that other researchers at Yale warned that artificial sweeteners also affect hormone secretion, cognitive processes and gut microbia.

DISINFORMATION ABOUT PHARMACEUTICALS

Writing for the Statistical Assessment Service, Butterworth criticized reporters Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee for a 2008 story that examined unreported industry ties in a story broadcast on the radio program “The Infinite Mind.” Months later, The New York Times reported that Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, the host of “The Infinite Mind”, earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program. NPR later cancelled their syndication of “The Infinite Mind”. NPR's vice president for programming said, "You can't be talking about the efficacy of certain drugs and at the same time be in the business of making money off those drugs. It is stark, and it is clear. She continued "I think there are times when revealing your involvement on a certain front is an acceptable form of disclosure. In this case, it is decidedly not."

Writing for Forbes in 2012, Trevor Butterworth dismissed the dangers of opioids, arguing that the era of oxycontin abuse was over and critics "turned opioids into a straw man for America’s problems with addiction, and salted the media with pharma-doctor conspiracy theories. Multiple media outlets later reported how payments to drug makers helped to fuel the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, later announced it would stop marketing opioids to doctors.

Butterworth also wrote a report that attempted to downplay the bias of industry-funded studies that experts cite as one cause of the Vioxx scandal. Reports in The BMJ noted that Merck tried to obscure the dangers of Vioxx and researchers publishing studies on Vioxx did not always disclose their ties to the company.

When a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug Avandia to be associated with cardiac events, Congress began an investigation and Butterworth wrote "a muddled column that sought to characterize the congressional investigations as a 'partisan slugfest.'" Butterworth also wrote a series of articles attacking The New York Times for their reporting on Avandia.

The New York Times reported that Avandia “was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009” and that several FDA safety officers demanded that it be removed from the market. GlaxoSmithKline later plead guilty and paid $3 Billion to resolve fraud allegations, including one count of failing to report safety data about the drug Avandia to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history When FDA decided to lift restrictions on Avandia, a researcher wrote in The BMJ the decision “means further drug safety disasters may occur.”

EXTERNAL LINKS

Desmog Blog, page on Statistical Assessment Service

Article at STAT, linking Trevor Butterworth with the Genetic Literacy Project

Trevor Butterworth and Sense About Science Spin Science for Industry

Analysis of Trevor Butterworth by authors of "Our Stolen Future"