
A scientific article funded by an American lobbying organization for the chemical industry, widely quoted by stakeholders to influence decision-makers, illustrates a wider strategy to create doubt.
A technical article with an austere title ("Grouping of PFAS for human health risk assessment"). Signed by an "independent panel of experts." Published in a peer-reviewed journal belonging to the world's leading scientific publishing group, Elsevier. Who could question the seriousness of this apparent contribution to the building of knowledge on the toxicity of per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances (PFAS), the toxic man-made chemicals ubiquitous in the environment?
And yet, the article, published in October 2022, stands out instead for its innovation in strategies for manipulating science. Le Monde and its partners in the Forever Lobbying Project investigation were interested in it because it is readily employed by lobbyists to maintain confusion and doubt about the proposed ban on PFAS in the European Union (EU), under discussion since February 2023.
Designed to halt the "regrettable substitution," by industrials, of PFAS identified as toxic by others just as problematic, the ban proposes a "grouping" approach to the 10,000 compounds that make up the PFAS family.

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Because it could well sound the death knell for "forever chemicals" in Europe, the proposal has become the target of an intense lobbying and disinformation campaign orchestrated by PFAS manufacturers and their industry umbrella groups. Channeling their lobbying arguments through public consultations, meetings and emails, the industrialists set out, if not to "kill" the project, at least to minimize its scope.
'Hidden agenda'
Among the scientific references that support their arguments is this article from 2022. It's cited no less than 85 times in the documents collected during our investigation, including in the documents of the lobbying organization Plastics Europe and in a presentation put together by the lobby group and France Chimie for a meeting at the French Ministry of the Economy in early 2023.
"Most experts agreed that 'all PFAS' should not be grouped together," the article states at the outset. This is a convenient conclusion for industry actors, who can use it in their lobbying against the "grouping" approach of the ban proposal. Before arriving at their final opinion, the scientists on the panel were subjected to several series of "blind" questions and comments, in other words, without being informed of the identity of the other members of the group. The methodology was presented as a guarantee of objectivity and quality of expertise.
But there was another crucial piece of information they weren't given until the end of the exercise: the identity of the study's sponsor. Namely, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the powerful lobbying organization for the chemical industry in the United States. The reader is only informed of this at the very end of the article. There, too, is buried the indication that "some of the individual expert panelists/coauthors do not agree with the majority views expressed in some sections of the paper."
Ian Cousins was one of them. "I was shocked to read that the funding source was ACC," he told Le Monde, "annoyed that I'd been tricked." An environmental chemist at Stockholm University in Sweden, Cousins is a leading PFAS specialist. But it was when he discovered the identity of some of the other panelists, consultants to the PFAS industry, that the initiative's "hidden agenda" became clear to him. "At this stage, I worked hard to make the paper as balanced as possible," he explained. "I added texts to state that the conclusions were not always a consensus view of the authors."
'Manufacturing doubt'
The brief mention of minority opinions would not exist without his intervention and that of Jamie DeWitt. The American toxicologist, a specialist in PFAS and director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at Oregon State University, said she is "upset" that the article is being used for lobbying purposes and that "many points are ignored, taken out of context or distorted."
To set up the panel, the ACC called on an intermediary, a firm called SciPinion. The main service offered: "scientific opinion certification" thanks to its "SciPi™ certified peer review process." Yet half of the article's 12 signatories work as consultants for industry. Some have even had the ACC and its PFAS advocacy unit, the FluoroCouncil, as clients, like the article's lead author, Janet Anderson, in 2019 and 2021. Contacted by email, she did not reply.
SciPinion founder and co-director Sean Hays explained to Le Monde the criteria used to select experts for their panels: "We exclude candidates who have direct conflicts of interest (employed by the sponsor or a competing company within the sector)" within the last five years. On the other hand, consultancy assignments are not considered an issue "for individuals who are otherwise highly qualified."
While these consultants are not all "mercenary scientists" who do "the dirty work" for industry, "enough of them are included in the panel to give them a majority vote, and also to ensure there is always uncertainty and lack of agreement," explained David Michaels, professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, DC. This expert on industry "product defense" strategies believes these studies "that pretend to be independent peer reviews are a new and dangerous tactic employed to manufacture scientific uncertainty."
Click here to see a glossary of PFAS-related terms.
'Product defense'
For their participation on the panel, confirmed Hays, each expert received a payment of $4,000 (€3,546 at the time of payment, in November 2021) – a relatively modest sum for the field. Except for Janet Anderson, who was paid more for her work as a "topic lead," but for a "confidential" amount. "Your line of questioning seems to focus myopically on funding," protested Hays. "This kind of bias misleads the readers of your publications and erodes trust in science." According to our estimates, the operation cost the ACC at least $100,000.
In addition to this unique business model, Hays and his co-director, Christopher Kirman, toxicologists themselves, own a "product defense" firm, Summit Toxicology, of which the ACC is an outstanding client. Their associate, a toxicology consultant, also used to hold the position of assistant editor of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, the journal that published the PFAS article. Until it was taken over in 2019 by a new editorial team, the journal was a sciencewashing journal used by the chemical, agrochemical, agriculture and even tobacco industries.

It's a sector that Kirman seems to avoid mentioning even in his CV, which he provided to Le Monde. However, several documents archived in the "Tobacco Papers" database of the University of California, San Francisco show that Kirman carried out work for Philip Morris in the 2000s. But the proximity to the cigarette maker is also more recent. Published in 2019, the text that SciPinion presents as the cornerstone of its methodological approach, entitled "Science peer review for the 21st century: Assessing scientific consensus for decision-making while managing conflict of interests, reviewer and process bias," was sponsored by Philip Morris.
In spring 2023, SciPinion published a new article, again on PFAS, again on the same principle. This one downplays their toxicity to the immune system. In the "independent panel of experts" are three consultants who were also authors of the 2022 article, including Janet Anderson. "Their findings are paid for by vested interests," said Philippe Grandjean, professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark and author of the studies that first documented these concerning effects on children. The internationally renowned environmental medicine researcher leaves no room for doubt: "This is contamination of science, not just PFAS contamination of the environment and humans."
Contributors to this report include Catharina Felke [NDR] and Emilie Rosso [France Télévisions])
For a complete list of articles from Le Monde and other media partners in this PFAS investigation, go to foreverpollution.eu/lobbying/.