Michael Fumento

Fumento has been a nationally syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, a legal writer for The Washington Times, a science correspondent for Reason magazine, an editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and the first national issues reporter for Investor's Business Daily. When he was embedded four times in Iraq and Afghanistan, his research and reporting from Ramadi was praised by General David Petraeus: "Great stuff with a great unit in a very tough neighborhood!"[7] Some of his combat video footage has aired on the History Channel.[13]

A finalist for the National Magazine Award, he has had articles appear in such magazines as Reader's Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Forbes.com, USA Weekend, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, Reason, Policy Review, The American Spectator, Nature Medicine, The Spectator (London), a3Umwelt (Austria), and The Bulletin (Australia). He has appeared in newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Sunday Times of London, Sunday Telegraph of London, and the Jerusalem Post.[7]

His television appearances include Nightline; ABC World News; ABC News 20/20, numerous programs on CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox; PBS; MacNeil-Lehrer; CNBC; the BBC; the Canadian Broadcasting Network; C-SPAN; the Christian Broadcasting Network; Donahue; This Week with David Brinkley, the History Channel, ESPN, and many others. Fumento has lectured throughout the world.[7]

Fumento has been outspoken in his support of adult stem cell research and critical of embryonic stem cell research and has criticized what he regards as a liberal and corporate bias in favor of the latter.

For Science Under Siege, he received two awards, including the American Council on Science and Health's Distinguished Science Journalist of 1993.

Fumento argues that many reports of threats to society are based on bad science and misused statistics. In addition to AIDS, Fumento's writing on science has covered such topics as global warming, ADHD, obesity, the health dangers of breast implants, teen drug use, and agrarian utopianism. He has been highly critical of what he considers extreme alarmism over such diseases as SARS[14] and the potential of a human avian flu pandemic.[15]

A common theme is his claim that many liberal environmental groups have a hysterical response to most artificial chemicals. He writes that naturally-occurring food chemicals are often as toxic as artificial compounds and that there is no scientific reason to view natural compounds as inherently safer. Environmental groups, he holds, willingly accept claims that manmade compounds cause cancer but gloss over the fact that the toxicity tests often involve quantities that are millions of times larger than what a human would ever ingest.

Several articles deal with the agricultural chemical Alar, banned as a carcinogen in the United States. Fumento noted that the dosages in one Alar study were the equivalent of almost 30 thousand apples a day for life.[16] In his view, it is impossible to test megadoses of chemicals on mice or rats and to extrapolate the results to conclusions about small doses on humans. The statistical nature of these studies, often analyzed by non-statisticians, leaves them vulnerable to extrapolation error. Researchers remain divided on the utility of such tests and on the safety of Alar, in particular.

He has been a frequent critic of activist Erin Brockovich since her eponymous movie first appeared in 2000.[17]

Fumento describes himself as a political conservative.[18] He has drawn criticism from liberal and veterans' activist groups for his views on Gulf War Syndrome (his Reason article "Gulf Lore Syndrome"[19] was a National Magazine Award finalist in 1998[20]) and for his writings since 1987,[21] which state that the threat of AIDS to the heterosexual population was greatly overstated. He promotes a position of "skepticism" toward claims that manmade chemicals cause cancer in humans.

Fumento is perhaps best known for his epidemiology work, especially infectious disease outbreaks. He argues that the perception of such outbreaks becomes exaggerated or otherwise distorted by those who exploit them to serve various agendas. In November 1987, he published a landmark article, "AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?"[22] in Commentary that in 1990 became the basis of a controversial book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics.[23] He wrote dozens of subsequent pieces on the subject.[24] In Commentary, he challenged the presumption of Life magazine, whose July 1985 cover declared in bold red letters, "Now No One Is Safe from AIDS."[25]

By 1987, the theme had become common. A January U.S. News & World Report cover story declared, "The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us... finding fertile growth among heterosexuals."[26] A New York Times headline that month read: "AIDS May Dwarf the Plague,"[27] citing remarks of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen, that AIDS could be worse than the "Black Death," which is estimated to have killed 30 percent to 60 percent of Europe's population.[29][30][32] Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made remarks[33] giving rise to the term "heterosexual AIDS explosion." Oprah Winfrey told her audience, "Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years."[34]

Fumento challenged that orthodoxy for which he and even those who wrote about him were condemned and even threatened.[35][36] He did so by interviewing and citing the work of epidemiologists, including the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) AIDS epidemiologist, Dr. Harold Jaffe,[37] who told him, "Those who are suggesting that we are going to see an explosive spread of AIDS in the heterosexual population have to explain why this isn't happening."

Although he would be accused of claiming heterosexuals have no AIDS risk,[38] the back cover of his AIDS book[39] stated, "The 'myth' of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it.... " Rather, he argued that while white middle-class heterosexuals were the target of AIDS propaganda, "the profile of the typical victim of heterosexually transmitted AIDS is a lower-class black woman who is the regular sex partner of an IV drug user."

As of 2007, the CDC's "estimated numbers of cases and rates (per 100,000 population) of HIV/AIDS," was 60.6 for black women but only 3.3 for white women.[40] In a theme discussed in Commentary and in his book, Fumento described various agendas served by promoting "AIDS hysteria:" "On the opposite side of the spectrum Christian fundamentalists deploy it in order to underline their vision of morality," he wrote in Commentary. He also discussed it in a 1988 New Republic cover story.[41]

On January 13, 2006, Scripps Howard announced it would terminate its business relationship with Fumento and cease carrying his column. At issue were opinion columns Fumento had written concerning the biotechnology firm Monsanto Company while he was working at the Hudson Institute. The connection between Fumento and Monsanto was first revealed by investigative reporter Eamon Javers in Business Week,[42] but it never stated that there was a quid pro quo, despite what many articles and blogs would claim.[43] General manager Peter Copeland explained that Fumento

did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto.... Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers.[44]

After the story was published, Fumento acknowledged that he benefited from Monsanto's grant to Hudson:

It was a $60,000 book grant to my employer, solicited back in 1999, which was applied to pre-established salary and benefits.[45]

However, Fumento said that Scripps Howard had no such policy and that the syndicate canceled his column upon receiving a phone call from Javers without consulting him. Moreover, such a policy would not make sense, he said, because it presumes someone who once benefited from a grant is considered forever in the donor's debt.[46]

Fumento wrote that he did not begin the Scripps column until four years after he had gotten the grant,[47] had been writing pro-biotech pieces since six years before he received the grant,[47] and that shortly after receiving it he ripped Monsanto for being 'chicken-hearted'[48] and "caving into environmentalist demands."[49] Moreover, he wrote, of the approximately 100 columns he published, only three so much as mentioned Monsanto, one in a single sentence.[47]

In a May 2012 essay, Fumento said that he considered himself part of the "Old Right" but that he rejected the "extreme right," which, he claimed, has been taken over the Republican Party and dominates conservative media. He gave the example of The Heartland Institute billboards, comparing believers in global warming to Ted Kaczynski, which Fumento said was the same kind of "mass hysteria" that he rejected in the claims for a heterosexual AIDS epidemic and a swine flu pandemic: "The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I'm horrified that these people have co-opted the name 'conservative' to scream their messages of hate and anger," Fumento said.[50]

Conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan demanded civility and a respect for order, Fumento wrote. He contrasted that to Andrew Breitbart "shrieking at peaceful protesters."[50]

US Representative Allen West (R-FL) said that there are "78 to 81" Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. There was little condemnation from the New Right, wrote Fumento.[50]

In a January 23, 2020, New York Post opinion article, "Don’t buy the media hype over the new China virus," referring to concerns about coronavirus disease 2019 during the COVID-19 pandemic as "tinfoil-hat paranoia," Fumento wrote that "there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus... we have been through these hysterias before.... An infected American is reportedly doing well.... Wuhan will be a lot worse in China, simply because health care there is vastly inferior. It appears that, like flu, Wuhan usually kills through often treatable secondary infections. Well, treatable in the West... there is no evidence that Wuhan... is more contagious than influenza or spreads differently.... So if you want, buy a (probably worthless) surgical mask to play “twins” with those “courageous” TV newsmen."[51][52][53] In a March 8, 2020 followup opinion article, he decried the "pure hysteria" about the virus," noted that there had been only 19 deaths in the US, and maintained that "the spread of the virus continues to slow."[54][55]