Lawrence Tabak’s agenda to keep the public from learning the health risks of mercury fillings – backed by the special interests that fund his pet projects via the stealth group “Friends of NIDCR” – has reached a level of ethical transgressions that he should be dismissed as Director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.
1st strike.
- Tabak’s assistant Braveman, keeping his boss in the loop at every stage via e-mails, circumvented the Federal Acquisition Regulation by secretly handpicking Big Tobacco consultant LSRO to do an “independent” review of the literature on mercury fillings. To reach the result consistent with Tabak’s pro-mercury agenda, Braveman handed a blueprint of the desired result in advance, insisted that no one with experience in mercury toxicity be on the panel, and arranged for an absolutely unqualified meetings planning company to be the nominal “contractor.” To give Tabak and Braveman the result they desired, LSRO’s report had to invert the contractual research question 180 degrees, an outrage Tabak ignored so he could praise the pre-cooked result.
These facts are well known to, Director Zerhouni, as he prudently appointed a national CPA firm to investigate this ethical and legal morass.
2nd strike.
Tabak lied to Congress about the LSRO-BETAH deal. He asserted, in writing to then-Chairman Burton and Congresswoman Watson, that BETAH “identified” LSRO to be the subcontractor. In fact – a point well known to Tabak because he was cc’d on the e-mails by his assistant Braveman – it was NIDCR and its partner FDA which identified LSRO. After negotiating the deal, they found out they could not secretly hand the money to LSRO but would have to bid it out. So Braveman and his subordinants, intent on engaging LSRO, fingered an existing contractor, BETAH – a meetings planning company with absolutely no experience in doing scientific reports. BETAH was appointed strawperson contractor so the scheme with LSRO could proceed.
With so much to cover up, Tabak tried to get Congress off his trail by stating, falsely, that it was BETAH which “identified” LSRO.
3rd strike
the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) – which policies unethical experiments on children – ruled that Tabak’s favorite project to protect mercury fillings, the notorious experiment on institutionalized children at a Portuguese orphanage, was done without the experimenters obtaining informed consent from the guardians of the children about the horrid effects of mercury exposure. To quote from their letter to Consumers for Dental Choice:
“OHRP found that the informed consent document for the research conducted by UW failed to adequately describe the reasonable foreseeable risks of the amalgams.”
Yet these experimenters knew the risk, stating in the grant request for the lucrative multimillion contract granted by Tabak, that mercury fillings could lead to
“… chronic debilitating neuromuscular diseases [presumably meaning ALS, Parkinson’s, and/or MS] and even acute, life-threatening health outcomes.”
Lawrence Tabak’s should resign.
LSRO: REVIEW AND ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE ON THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF DENTAL AMALGAM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
three-strikes-lawrence-tabak
Articles like this one must ALWAYS include a date else readers have not the faintest idea whether this is something that happened ten years ago or yesterday and ongoing.