Journalist Marc Gunther recently authored articles for
Undark (here)
and Medium (here)
about “The tainted science of Stanton Glantz.”
It is evident that Gunther interviewed or corresponded with
numerous Glantz research critics. Gunther’s sources include the author of this
blog, who provided extensive documentation of Glantz’s questionable work. However,
since Gunther fails to tell the whole story, I will provide the rest of it here.
Fake Heart Attacks
The most important items in Gunther’s articles are his
descriptions of Glantz’s flawed heart attack study that appeared in the Journal
of the American Heart Association – a work that was retracted eight months
after its publication in June 2019. Gunther described that study and its
repercussions in his Undark article as follows:
“…when describing
the second study, published in 2019 in the Journal of the American Heart
Association, Glantz said it provided ‘more evidence that e-cigs cause heart
attacks.’… Critics pounced on what they called glaring flaws in the analyses. Some
of the e-cigarette users had previously smoked, for example, muddying the
correlation. Brad Rodu, a University of Louisville professor who has numerous
and longstanding connections to the tobacco industry, dug into the raw data and
found that at least 11 of the 38 heart-attack victims cited in the Journal
of the American Heart Association study had suffered their heart attacks
before they started vaping — some as many as 10 years before. Glantz was made
aware of the temporality problem before publication because it was raised by a
peer reviewer, the journal’s editor subsequently realized.
“Sixteen tobacco
researchers wrote to the journal editor asking for a retraction, and the
Journal of the American Heart Association ultimately did just that — something
it has done only a handful of times in its history. Its editor, though, was
careful to state in a letter to Glantz that ‘the retraction notice is
intentionally absent of any language suggesting scientific misconduct.’
“Andrew Gelman, a
professor of statistics at Columbia University who followed the controversy on
his blog, was unimpressed with Glantz’s response to the retraction, calling it ‘anti-scientific.’
He wrote: ‘If someone points out an error in your work, you should correct the
error and thank the person. Not attack and try to salvage your position with
procedural arguments.’”
Gunther is correct: I had discovered that Glantz deliberately
deceived the journal’s editors and readers by counting heart attacks before
people had vaped. My comments on this appeared in a USA
Today article by Jayne O’Donnell on July 17, 2019. O’Donnell wrote, “However,
when Rodu obtained the federal data, he found the majority of the 38 patients
in the study who had heart attacks had them before they started vaping — by an
average of 10 years earlier. In his letter to the editors [dated July
11, 2019], Rodu called Glantz's findings ‘false and invalid…Their analysis
was an indefensible breach of any reasonable standard for research on
association or causation…We urge you to take appropriate action on this
article, including retraction.’” (emphasis added)
As noted, I publicly called for a retraction on July 17,
2019. But Gunther credited the retraction to “sixteen tobacco researchers,” linking
to a letter they wrote to the journal editor on January 20, 2020. In the USA
Today article I also called for a federal investigation, and I followed up
a year later with a full analysis of the fraudulent findings, which was
published in the journal Addiction (discussed here).
Gunther correctly cited influential statistician Andrew
Gelman. I had corresponded with Gelman in 2018 about Glantz’s woefully
defective Pediatrics study, which also elicited a retraction demand from
me (here,
here,
here
and here).
Gelman’s account of our correspondence is here
(see Episode 1). Three months before Pediatrics retracted the study, Gelman ran
the analysis of it that I had recommended to researchers
world-wide in November 2019.
In his Medium article, Gunther identifies a group of “respected
veterans of the anti-smoking movement (Steven Schroeder, Ken Warner, David
Abrams, Raymond Niaura and [Michael] Siegel),” and he provided links to their university
profiles. Later in the article, he attributes the JAHA retraction to
“other scholars”, followed by a comment from me, who he characterizes again
with “whose work has been supported by the tobacco industry.” Gunther makes no
mention of my 27 years of research into tobacco harm reduction, and provides no
link to my university webpage profiles (here and here).
Perhaps Gunther was influenced by the established (anti-) tobacco
research and policy community, some of whom switched to support safer products
only after e-cigarettes became popular. Gunther writes that they tolerated
Glantz’s defective studies.
“‘Stan has always
been an advocate and ideologue willing to twist the science,’ says David
Abrams, a New York University professor and veteran tobacco researcher. He says
that some scientists ignored flaws in his work when Glantz focused on
combustible tobacco because they, too, strongly opposed smoking. ‘Frankly, none
of us cared if he was a little bit sloppy with his research because the ends
justified the means,’ Abrams says.”
I never tolerated Glantz’s flaws and sloppy research, and I
published numerous critical comments in journal forums and in my blog starting
in 2004. Gunther mentioned two examples but did not acknowledge the active role
I played in correcting Glantz’s record.
Fake Teen Gateway
Gunther’s biggest error is his description of Glantz’s “2018
study in Pediatrics, [which] also claimed that e-cigarette usage
encourages more young people to smoke…a gateway effect, but the alleged link
between vaping and smoking disappeared when other teen behaviors, such as using
marijuana, were taken into account.”
I replicated that study’s analysis and proved that Glantz’s
team had fabricated false results, which I described in detail in a letter to
the editors that included a call for retraction (here).
That led to an extended exchange with Glantz and Pediatrics editors,
with the latter going to great lengths to defend the flawed research (here,
here
and here).
The “Helena Miracle”
Gunther noted the “Helena miracle”, in which Glantz credited
public smoking bans for a decrease in hospital admissions for heart attacks in
the small Montana town. Gunther wrote, “The small sample size in Helena — four
cases per month during the ban, compared to seven beforehand — should have
raised red flags; random fluctuations could have explained the drop in hospital
admissions.” As I had told Gunther, bright red flags were raised by me in
comments to the BMJ in 2004 (here)
and 2006 (here).
My analysis showed that the number of hospital admissions in Helena and other
miracle localities was so small that “the relevant question is whether [the
Helena] report involves anything more than random variation.” (here)
I attempted to reproduce Glantz’s tiny city reports by
conducting an analysis using state-wide data. My study, published in 2011 (discussed
here), was subsequently referenced by other researchers (here).
I found that rates of death due to heart attacks in states with smoking bans
were no different than those in states with no ban, and that heart attacks had
been declining everywhere for years. The last point is something Glantz never took
into account; in fact, he freeloaded his second-hand
smoke heart-attack results on the decades-long downward trend in heart attack
rates.
Fake “Softening” of the Smoking Population
In 2015, Glantz proclaimed in Tobacco Control that there is no public health basis for advising
smokers that smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes are safer cigarette
alternatives, because the smoking population in the U.S. was “softening”, i.e.,
becoming more likely to quit (abstract here).
Once again, I found that his analysis was seriously flawed, as he failed to
consider a number of other significant factors. My research group recreated his
analysis and took into account the missing factors; we found that Glantz’s “softening”
disappeared. We published our study in
the journal Addiction (discussed here).
Other Glantz Publication Problems
Glantz Redefined Youth Smoking, 2014 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2014/04/ucsf-redefines-youth-smoking-journals.html
Glantz Falsely Linked E-Cigarettes to Smoking, 2014 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2014/03/ucsf-study-falsely-links-e-cigarettes.html
Glantz Misrepresented IQOS Studies to the FDA, 2017 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2017/11/smoke-but-no-fire-iqos-opponent.html
Glantz Used Complicated Models to Try to Change NYTS Data,
2017 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2017/02/complicated-models-cant-alter-data.html
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2017/02/complicated-models-cant-alter-data-part.html
Glantz’s Failed Attempt to Link Teen Smoking to Cinematic
Smoking, 2017 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2017/08/teen-smoking-unconnected-to-cinematic_30.html
Another E-Cigarette Gateway Claim by Glantz Based on Tiny
Numbers, 2018 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2018/04/another-uc-san-francisco-e-cigarette.html
Trace Toxins in Teens Improperly Blamed on E-Cigarettes,
2018 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2018/03/beyond-headlines-trace-toxins-present.html
Federal Funds Misspent on Glantz’s Research, 2020 https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2020/02/federal-funds-misspent-on-anti-vaping.html
Since 2006, the National Institutes of Health has funneled
$51 million to Glantz at the University of California San Francisco. In
addition to the flawed heart attack work, which may be viewed as research
misconduct using federal funds, he published 300 other articles. I list above
only the worst offenders and note my attempts to correct them.
