(If you missed the story, here is one analysis to link into the story. I choose this one not because it is particularly good or comprehensive, but because it embeds a video statement from a Komen official whose title is apparently "ambassador"; if you look at it (the initial still is sufficient -- you don't have to run the video), see if you share my take, which was, "huh? is she the ambassador from 1950?")
Whatever one might think about the ethics and politics involved, it should seem strange to see rhetoric that suggests that one "charity" (Komen is more of a business, making money with licensing the pink ribbon logo and such) giving money to another charity is some kind of entitlement, and its withdrawal is a violation akin to government interference in free choice. It should not be seen as surprising or scandalous that a single-issue special interest political lobbying group decides it does not want to alienate potential supporters, either donors or those in power, by supporting an organization that is best known for something that is fiercely hated by many.
(Aside: I am particularly amused by the bullshit claim that people who think that abortion is murder should not be so incensed toward Planned Parenthood because they only spend 3% of their budget on abortion services. That is sort of like saying that we should not be so down on al Qaeda because they only spent 3% of their budget on the 9-11 attacks, and they did some good work in Bosnia. I trust EP-ology readers are smart enough to not freak out like... well, let's just say like some people I know, and say "Phillips is saying that PP is like aQ! he is evil and I will listen to nothing he says!" I trust regular readers will guess that I am generally favorably disposed to PP, and I trust that you will understand the point.)
It is important to realize that the sum involved is modest -- a mid-six-figure sum that probably comes out to a single-digit number of pennies for every person who became incensed about the defunding. Indeed, the last figure I saw put the protest donations flowing into Planned Parenthood over the few days of the controversy at about five times the loss, including $250,000 from Michael Bloomberg.
The whole fight seems less absurd when we recognize it for what it was, pure "our team" versus "their team" power politics. Anti-liberals (for lack of a better descriptor -- it has the advantage of capturing those who opposed liberalism in both senses of the word) are constantly trying to apply pressure against any organization, company, university, etc. that does anything they do not like -- if it were organized crime doing this, we would call it extortion or a shakedown, as in "if you want to do business in our neighborhood, you are going to need to pay some dues". In this case, Komen caved to the thuggery (which was undoubtedly supported by a fifth column, as is pretty much always the case when any of the aforementioned organizations cave to anti-liberalism).
But the liberal (as in "American activist left") side saw this case as a good one to fight back. Unlike trying to save ACORN or engage in stimulus to get us out of the Lesser Depression, this did not require standing up and trying to argue against someone, an act which seems to cause the limousine liberal left to cower in fear. The lefty politicos realized that no one would express opposition to funding to support breast cancer screening, so they brought out their thugs. That is, they mobilized mass political action from their base to threaten Komen's funding, and it worked. The message was really about more than a few hundred thousand dollars that was already replaced, it was about saying to everyone, "do not give into the opposition's thuggery, because we can mobilize just as big an army and hurt you just as much as they can." The similarity to criminal gangs fighting for territory is no accident, though this should not make it seem odd or even nefarious. This is mass political mobilization in action, the same force employed in the US civil rights movement, Tahrir Square, or the fight against internet censorship. It does a lot of good; we should just not pretend it is not what it is.
Notice that this entire analysis involves no mention of health. Indeed, the saddest part of the whole thing is the "no one would express opposition" bit, along with the fact that there was never any chance that this would cause any fewer mammograms to get done. This is sad because it continues to be clear that mammography is done far too much in the US and several other countries, and perhaps doing any population screening at all is too much.
A new popular press book by the leading breast cancer screening expert, Peter Gøtzsche, presents the whole case against current screening regimens. Regular readers of this blog will recall several previous posts about how mass screening for fairly rare diseases in average-risk populations is almost never a good idea (I mentioned the only two exceptions I could think of). For the case of mammography, the case against is stronger than average -- there are the standard screening problems of having to do a huge number of (expensive) screens, the costs of false positives, and the many technically-true positives that would never have progressed to the point they caused harm (I think Gotzsche's number for this is 1/3; I once calculated that it was closer to 1/2, but I am inclined to defer to him). But there are also the problems that mammography involves ionizing radiation, and thus causes some cases of breast cancer, and how often the (often unnecessary) treatment is quite injurious.
The biggest cost seems to be unnecessary treatment that is captivatingly difficult to avoid once the screen result is in. In other words, the case against breast cancer screening is similar to the case against prostate cancer screening, which has now been pretty widely accepted as convincing. Breast cancer screening, however, has a much stronger lobby of clinics and charities that make a fortune from it. An article in the Guardian about the book and the topic tells of plans for the UK government to review their current screening recommendations and funding, which are less aggressive than those in the US. I am not exactly optimistic that science will prevail over the politics.
I will admit that I do not expect to read the book I am sort of plugging here since I am pretty confident I know what it says -- I have been following Gotzsche's work since we were both working on this topic ten years ago. So I will quote from the Guardian article instead:
The data, Gøtzsche has maintained for more than a decade, does not support mass screening as a preventive measure. Screening does not cut breast cancer deaths by 30%, it saves probably one life for every 2,000 women who go for a mammogram. But it harms 10 others. Cancerous cells that will go away again or never progress to disease in the woman's lifetime are excised with surgery and sometimes (six times in 10) she will lose a breast. Treatment with radiotherapy and drugs, as well as the surgery itself, all have a heavy mental and physical cost.
"I believe the time has come to realise that breast cancer screening programmes can no longer be justified," Gøtzsche said. "I recommend women to do nothing apart from attending a doctor if they notice anything themselves."So how much health press coverage did Gotzche's book get? In addition to the Guardian article, the Telegraph ran an abbreviated version of the same article, suggesting this to not be a left-right issue in the UK. Beyond that, the same article ran in Australia and there were a collection of non-English-language reports from across Europe and a few other places that I cannot read, but that seem to be basically the same content. I appears that the Guardian reporter, the health desk editor, deserves credit for the high-quality article and inspiring all the coverage; article sameness would normally mean that they were just all press-release transcriptions, but in this case it is pretty clearly a work of genuinely good journalism.
The limited of coverage is not too surprising, given the politics:
He compares screening advocates to religious believers and argues that their hostile attitudes are harmful to scientific progress. A lot of false evidence has been put forward to claim that the screening effect was large, he writes. Those who tried to expose the errors came under personal attack, as if they were blasphemers.
"I cannot help wonder why many people shrug their shoulders when they learn of scientific misconduct and why many scientists don't care that they deceive their readers repeatedly and betray the confidence society has bestowed on them, whether for a political gain, for fame, for money, for getting research funding or for any other reason. People may keep on being dishonest, may get away with it and may publish in the same journals time and again, to the hurrahs of like-minded people who are often editors of the same journals," he writes.
Some of the screening trials were biased or badly done, the book says, for instance by deciding on the cause of death of a woman after researchers knew whether she had been screened for breast cancer or not. The best trials, it says, failed to prove that lives were saved by screening.(See the trend in what characterizes issues I have become interested in during my career?)
As for coverage of the book and story here in the US, I could find no evidence that it was picked up by any newspaper or broadcast outlet even though the Guardian story was available on the UPI wire service. With that in mind, it is no surprise that there was no mention, regarding the defunding of Planned Parenthood's screening, that funding fewer mammogams might not be a bad idea. As I said, the fight was not about health, it was about proving that the left can exert financial pressure too -- not enough to fight Wall Street, but enough to fight the right-wing churches.
I have to say that I find it to be a little odd that people actually give money to Komen. It is a hugely profitable quasi-business, with a budget that makes anything an average person can donate completely inconsequential, and that spends the money on a cause that is ridiculously over-funded (even apart from the money wasted on too much screening). Giving money to them seems like giving money to the NIH or the Bloomberg Foundation. Surely people must care about homeless puppies, or educating African girls, or their local youth center, or something else that desperately needs more funding. Giving to Planned Parenthood, for example, would make a lot more sense.
And finally, there might actually be a bit more behind the political action by the Bloomberg types than just showing that limousine liberals can mobilize effective counter-thuggery. Consider that women can be persuaded to get a mammogram at age 40 and every two years thereafter, even though that regimen is clearly doing more harm than good (that is undoubtedly true, even if getting a few between 50 and 65 might be justified). These women are then perfectly primed to be useful idiots in support of anti-smoking, anti-drinking, anti-sugar, etc. campaigns. "I am taking the time to engage in prevention and be healthy, so those other people should not be allowed to misbehave and impose costs on the rest of us", she thinks self-rightiously, oblivious to the fact that breast cancer screening causes a huge net increase in health care spending. This makes her a perfect soldier for the oligarchs who want to turn the proletariat into focused and healthy means of production, rather than people who want to enjoy their lives for their own sake. It is astonishingly sad that this is where the "left" decides to draw their line in the sand. Fights over reproductive freedom are one of the best things to ever happen to the oligarchs, with fights over heavy-handed "public health" interventions running not too far beyond.
