Maurice Emile LeVois

Maurice Emile LeVois, Ph.D. was a tobacco industry consultant and his company was called LeVois & Associates.

Biography
Maurice LeVois was formerly the Director of the Veterans Administration (VA) Office of Agent Orange Research and Education, and also a scientist (epidemiologist) in the Agent Orange Study Unit at the Centers for Disease Control. In this 1985 period, the VA and the Department of Defence were resisting claims that the dioxins in Agent Orange were causing health problems for the Vietnamese or the returned soldiers and airmen. The veterans and Vietnamese claimed that the dioxins in the herbicide had also caused birth defects in their children.

Closely associated with the VA at this time was the Office of Technical Assessments (OTA) which had an Agent Orange-dioxin study mandated by Congress. The design of the protocol for the project was in the hands of a small committee headed by a senior staff member of the OTC, Michael Gough, and on the Protocol advisory panel was Dr George L. Carlo, who had just retired from service as a 'fire-fighting' epidemiologist with the Dow Chemical Company. Carlo had set up as a science-for-sale entrepreneur under the business name George Carlo & Associates. LeVois, Carlo and Gough later supported Steven J. Milloy with The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) operation for Philip Morris, and for some Milloy-Gough project run through the Cato Institute.

Shortly after, Carlo and LeVois set up a business partnership Health & Environmental Sciences (HES -- later extended to HESG for 'Group') with Carlo running the Washington DC office, and LeVois running San Francisco. They also had a Canadian associate, Ian Munro who had a similar company Cantox which carried the subtitle 'Health & Environmental Sciences' also. [After 1993, Carlo and Munro worked together on tobacco and on cellphone health projects (Wireless Technology Research of WTR) for the Cellular Telephone Industry Aassociation (CTIA)]

In 1989 LeVois and Carlo joined forces in putting up a major proposal ($200,000) for fake research to Philip Morris by way of an industry cut-out, The Newman Partnership (one of the partners was Fred Newman, General Counsel to Philip Morris, the other was his brother Larry) http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/lin34e00/pdf

Part One of their proposal was for a questionnaire and phone study of scientists and medical practitioners, where the subjects were manipulated to say that they believed smoking was hazardous, without being able to identify which particular studies proved causal connection with heart and lung-disease. These figures could be process to show that scientists were often 'biased' based on the conventonal views held by other scientists -- and therefore not to be trusted.

Part Two of the so-called scientific proposal was, in fact, a PR plan in how to exploit these findings without revealing that the tobacco industry was behind the operation. They were aiming to direct public attention and criticism at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which was about to release its Risk Assessment on passive smoking (ETS). This pseudo-study was eventually release through an astroturf operation known as the Institute for Regulatory Policy (IRP) which was created by ex-OSHA Director Thorne Auchter (later a silent partner with Carlo in HESG), and the ex-OMB/OIRA head, Jim Tozzi, for Philip Morris. Tozzi and Auchter operated through numerous companies and think tanks -- Multinational Business Services (MBS), Federal Focus, Center for Environmental Health, Institute for Regulatory Policy -- and a half-dozen more. Many of these were run for the tobacco industry, while others were created and run for the Chemical Manufacturers Association and its subsidiaries. []

Carlo and LeVois appear to have split up during the period of this Philip Morris Bias-study project, and LeVois became partners with another tobacco scientist on the West Coast, [Maxwel W Layard]. LeVois figures extensively in the tobacco archive documents, sometimes credited as the principal scientist at [Environmental Health Resources], "an association of consulting epidemiologists and statisticians with offices in Mill Valley, California.", while Layard ran [Layard Associates] in Mountain View, Calif.. But in fact this was a loose partnership arrangement with each being contracted either separately, or together, depending on the tobacco company's requirements. [ http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/cms25e00/pdf]

Both LaVois and Layard provided witness and faux-research services to the tobacco industry for many years, both in America and at tobacco trouble-spots around the world. LeVois was more versatile, working for a couple of different industries, while ex-maths-teacher, Max Layard made most of his income solely from statistics done for the tobacco industry. (See page 9} []

In 1990 and again in 1993, Levois was asked by The Tobacco Institute to submit testimony criticizing the manner in which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Assessment treated the issue of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), and its possible relationship to lung cancer. Levois stated that in his judgment, the risk EPA's assessment had "numerous basic flaws and cannot be relied on as an estimate of ETS-related risk." As Tobacco Institute ETS consultant-witnesses, Layard and LeVois were constantly in demand and earned considerable money for their occasional services

As a paid consultant to the Tobacco Institute in 1996, LeVois submitted critical comments to EPA, while also working with another industry consultant named Peter N. Lee on a rebuttal to the World Health Organisations passive smoking study. This was being run by the WHO's French laboratory, the International Agency for Reseach in Cancer IARC.

[Note: In the tobacco archives and in some documents Maurice's name is misspelled LeVois, and occasionally as La Vois or La Voic]

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