CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. HEALTH
A new study reinforces the safety of childhood vaccines once suspected of causing autism.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on what the relevant science tells us:
“The vaccine preservative Thimerosal is not linked with autism, a new study reports. The data also suggest that the dilettante ‘scientist’ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. should perhaps go back to practicing law and stop exploiting parental fear and suffering for his own political agenda. Despite an absence of intriguing, let alone compelling, evidence that mercury-containing Thimerosal was associated with autism, vaccine makers voluntarily began removing Thimerosal from their products in 1999 – providing a perfect opportunity to study whether the removal (and, therefore, Thimerosal) had any effect on autism rates.”
2. BUSINESS
Philip Morris parent-company Altria announces that it is shutting down its New York City world headquarters.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on why the company is leaving the Big Apple:
“Altria, the parent company of cigarette-maker Philip Morris, is shutting down its headquarters in New York City and will no longer employ the “vast majority” of its employees there. At the same time, it is spinning off its profitable overseas business to an independent entity (Philip Morris International), to be headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, and shifting its U.S. headquarters to Richmond, Virginia. It is spinning off its overseas operations in order to shield them from lawsuits in the U.S., like the ones that have forced it to pay billions of dollars to state governments, such as Minnesota, Texas, Mississippi, and Florida, and millions of dollars to individual smokers. Continental Europe in general, and Switzerland in particular, have court systems that are less indulgent towards lawsuits than American courts.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
Honolulu hosts a meeting of international climate change negotiators.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman on the trade-offs to adopting global energy regulations:
“Economists agree that an abrupt transition to a clean energy future would cost the global economy scores, even hundreds, of trillions of dollars. Numbers, no matter how eye-popping, are only an abstraction of the human consequences of a low growth/expensive energy future. Greater wealth yields more medical care, less exposure to the elements and better nutrition-all of which save or prolong human life. By extension, slow growth kills, because it deprives the poorest of the means to ward off cold, sickness and disease. So what’s worse: the warming, or the policy? Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg applied a cost/benefit analysis to climate change mitigation measures like the Kyoto Protocol, and found they were a tragic waste of money.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
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