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StumbleUponStossel Spins Science Funding
10/26/99
ABC's John Stossel's recent 20/20 report (10/11/99), "Lobbying for Lives," presented a simplistic look at a very complicated matter-- the allocation of medical research dollars by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The show's basic premise is that Beltway politicking controls which diseases receive funding; Stossel states early on in the segment that "Congress makes sure that they spend the lion's share of the money on the people who have the most political clout." But Stossel's explanation of the NIH's funding process and of which diseases impact society most is based on faulty facts and flawed analysis.
For Stossel, the facts are simple: "Why is it a good thing to spend 10 times more on AIDS than on breast cancer or prostate cancer? Or, for that matter, 25 times more than on Parkinson's, which kills more people?"
This claim about Parkinson's deaths is not supported by health officials or Parkinson's researchers. The most recent (1997) mortality report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not list Parkinson's as one of the 15 leading causes of death in America, but HIV/AIDS was ranked 14th.
Dr. Stanley Fahn, who heads the Parkinson's research unit at New York City's Presbyterian Hospital, has said: "The saying is that you don't die from Parkinson's; you die with it…. Most die from unrelated, natural causes." (People, 1/11/99) Stossel did not reply to FAIR's inquiry about what data he based his claim on.
The statement that Parkinson's kills more people than AIDS is one of the more egregious factual errors in "Lobbying for Lives," but, unfortunately, it's not the only thing Stossel gets wrong.
NIH Funding
The diseases with the most "political clout," in Stossel's view, are AIDS and breast cancer. Focusing in particular on the vigorous activism that has arisen in response to the AIDS crisis, Stossel wonders why AIDS research receives so much funding relative to research on other diseases.
To back up this contention, Stossel uses a zero-sum method of pitting one disease against another to find that "AIDS, with its $1.8 billion budget, gets the most money." This kind of simplified analysis of scientific research is specifically warned against by the NIH, which states that it is not a reliable method of evaluating funding. According to the NIH website, "research aimed at one target often hits another"--for example, AIDS research has been beneficial for a range of immunological and viral problems. Consequently, there is "no 'right' amount of money, percentage of the budget, or number of projects for any disease." No one representing this point of view, or the NIH in general, appeared on the broadcast.
Indeed, one recent study attempting to establish a relationship between medical funding and different measures of "disease burden" found that funding levels were closely associated with disability-adjusted life-years, or the loss of healthy life to disease (New England Journal of Medicine, 6/17/99).
As NIH director Harold Varmus, M.D., explained in an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine (6/17/99), NIH's method of coding research dollars also explains some of the disparities in funding. AIDS funding, for example, may cover a range of related research activities, including studies of infections or T-Cell biology.
In truth, how research dollars are allocated is generally not determined by disease. Funding decisions are based on a host of factors--from considerations of public health to the general advancement of scientific knowledge. While it is apparently the subject of the report, Stossel does very little to even explain how the NIH works.
Stossel's cut and dried conclusion--that AIDS gets more research dollars, to the detriment of research in other areas--is based partly on what some say is a flawed method of accounting that tends to inflate the NIH's AIDS totals. The report offers very little information about how research funding is distributed, or why. In the absence of such information, Stossel goes looking for other explanations.
AIDS vs. Parkinson's?
Another very basic problem with "Lobbying for Lives" is Stossel's comparison of AIDS and breast cancer with Parkinson's disease. There are a whole host of factors that make AIDS a fundamentally different kind of disease than Parkinson's, requiring a different kind of response: AIDS, an infectious disease, has evolved into a world-wide epidemic; it is a relatively new disease, without a long research history to draw on; and, as mentioned earlier, AIDS research has proven beneficial to other medical research as well.
Explaining current levels of funding for AIDS research, Stossel says:
"If you want to know how to make money and influence the government, look no further than the AIDS lobby. Fifteen years ago, as AIDS was killing more and more people, NIH spent little on AIDS research. So, desperate to be heard, AIDS activists rewrote the book on medical research lobbying. They heckled President Reagan, stopped traffic, marched on Congress and accused politicians who ignored their demands of discrimination against homosexuals."
To characterize AIDS activists as a group whose main goal is to "make money and influence the government" is to dismiss the devastating reality of the epidemic they are responding to. At no point does Stossel acknowledge that the scope, rapid growth and newness of AIDS infections in the 1980s justified an increase in spending. Neither does he examine the possibility that the recent decline in AIDS deaths might be a sign of money well-spent in containing a public health crisis.
ACTION: Contact ABC and John Stossel and inquire why readily available information that complicates or undermines Stossel's thesis was left out of "Lobbying for Lives." Ask why numerous health experts who could have provided a full debate of Stossel's conclusions were not included.
ABC News- 20/2077 W. 66th StreetNew York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-2020 (20/20)E-mail: 2020@abc.com; stossel@abc.com
See FAIR's Archives for more
on:
Disney/John Stossel
The Money Taboo in Health Reform Coverage: Industry donations to powerful players often go unmentioned
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