Told you so files: no link between cancer and Ground Zero

We complained when "the federal government added cancer to the list of sicknesses covered by the $4.3 billion World Trade Center fund"; now a JAMA study of 55,700 people with Ground Zero exposure finds, not unexpectedly, no link to cancer. [NYT]

The question now becomes whether the fund will waste only $3-4 billion of taxpayer money or whether future Congresses will be bullied into a giveaway of tens of billions of dollars to people based on geographic proximity when the fund is scheduled to close in 2016. I warned precisely against this inevitable waste, but Jon Stewart and Democrats politicized the issue into "Republicans don't care about NYC first responders," media bias failed to tell the other side of the story, and Republicans caved after some minor changes to make the bill a bit less worse.

1 Comment

David Nieporent | December 20, 2012 1:15 PM | Reply

The local news coverage of this finding that I saw yesterday (I was a captive audience; I don't normally watch local news) spun it as, "Well, there was no effect on the overall cancer rate, but they found increased risk of three specific cancers," without any of the caveats for why that doesn't mean much.

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