Time to Redefine Conflict of Interest
Foundation funding has polluted the world of research, policy and academics far worse than any industry could
In the mid-2010s, I was having a conversation with several directors from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) about joining their external Risk Communication Advisory Board. As one of the early science and risk communicators in the 1990s, and as a full-time academic, I had thought I ticked all of the boxes. But the EFSA directors informed me that, as much as they personally liked my work, I could not participate on this advisory board as I had worked for industry (over ten years before) and EFSA would have to consider that a “conflict of interest”. I was confused by their logic as I knew quite well that at least three of the members on that EFSA Advisory Board were academics running programs and projects directly funded by industry.
The term “conflict of interest” seems to only apply to people who have worked directly for industry. Even ten years after leaving industry, I somehow was too “tainted” to touch. Activists working for an NGO paid by a foundation or, worse, paid by an industry that supports their transition strategy (like organic food or renewables industries) do not feel their “bought and paid for” interventions should be considered a conflict of interest. They don’t need to defend themselves so long as NGOs constantly attack corporate funding to deflect their own stink. This prejudice, constantly amplified, has infected public perception leading to a tolerance towards a large number of unacceptable foundation funding practices of media groups, scientific researchers, NGOs, academics and political actors.
So long as the public feels that the billions spent every day by foundations, non-transparently funding media reporting on their activist campaigns, anti-capitalist dogma, political interference and legal interventions stink far less than the few industry millions trying to defend jobs and innovations, they can go on ignoring the glaring hypocrisy. Worse, foundation funding is tax deductible, so their lobbying and financial gaming is paid for by everyone.
But it still stinks to high heaven.
The best example of their twisted perspective was when the European Commission awarded a €3 million tender (uncontested and thus illegitimate) to a consortium of anti-tobacco NGOs to prepare advice for the upcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive. Tobacco harm reduction advocates complained that the lead NGO, the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP), was paid and committed to stopping alternative nicotine products like e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches, and this constituted a conflict of interest. The head of the ENSP told Euractiv that, as an NGO, the very concept of a conflict of interest is not applicable. Awkwardly, the European Commission made the consortium members promise (ie, sign a declaration of honor) to be objective so they could continue to work on their soon-to-be published report that will guide European Commission policy toward a nicotine-free Europe (known commonly as the EU Bloomberg Report).
NGO activists have continued to propagate this double-standard, demanding transparency only from industry. If you claim you don’t have conflicts of interest, then you don’t need to publish your accounts, acknowledge your funding or special interests. Eko (formerly SumOfUs) has campaigned against industries they deem non-transparent. But while they operated in the European Union, they refused to file a European Transparency Initiative report until 2019 (after a loud campaign by some blogger in Brussels) but if you read the transparency report they file, they declare no lobbying costs and almost all of the lines are left blank. Transparency is for the stupid.
The Firebreak has repeatedly called for foundations to be held to the same standards of transparency, not only declaring how much they give to which campaigns, research or lobbying work, but also to abandon the completely dark practice of donor-advised funds (where interest groups can donate to a foundation anonymously on the understanding that the funds are earmarked for their designated recipient). Fiscal sponsors are even worse as the foundations operate NGO-like campaigns from entities that technically don’t exist – no tax declarations, no accountability. Some of these activist front groups (like Beyond Plastics or the Agroecology Fund) spend or regrant hundreds of millions of dollars per year and pretend to be legitimate organizations, lobbying regulators, testifying in front of Congress and organizing public campaigns. But through tricks of smoke and mirrors, these “NGOs” don’t exist.
Their “If a tree falls in a forest” logic is sound (albeit unethical). If they work for an organization that does not exist and does not declare its funding, it is impossible to have a conflict of interest. They believe you can only have a conflict if you make a profit, and these NGOs spend their resources as fast as they can.
The hypocrisy is rich here. Take for example the European NGO, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). Before becoming the leading group in pushing the post-capitalist narrative, this group was founded to demand industry transparency, but those rules do not apply at all to them. Firebreak research showed how around half of their funding not only comes from dark, donor-advised funds, but these groups are based in the United States. Should Europe allow an interest group (claiming to be European) to influence the EU decision process on issues like trade and innovation while acting on behalf of undeclared American special interests? Given that they are representing non-transparent, foreign agents and interest groups, activists belonging to Corporate Europe Observatory should be stripped of access to the European Parliament, Commission and other institutions that demand a certain modicum of ethics, integrity and transparency. But they are an NGO … so nobody cares.
So long as industry is battling a public trust deficit and NGOs and foundations keep exploiting their trust surplus, activists can get away with anything. Trust is more important than truth.
The Science of Interest
Industry funds research. Innovation is key to developing new products and markets, continuous improvement of existing products (product stewardship) and to meet regulatory demands for product safety and sustainability. But is industry-funded research inherently biased and corrupted. If the science is improperly conducted, a company risks failed market share, years of litigation or clean-up costs. In other words, it is in a company’s interest to get the science right.
Industry is constantly under the microscope so any ethical or methodological transgressions by their researchers would quickly be exposed. There have been a few cases of well-publicized malfeasance but, by and large, industry research and innovation has been properly conducted, bringing an incredible number of new products and services to consumers, improving lives and well-being. Governments need data to regulate products that only industries are capable of providing, using the agreed upon Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) techniques.
Foundations are starting to fund counter-research, but no one here is talking about GLP. Rather, the activist science is designed to produce data to contradict existing data and raise public fear and outrage. The recent plethora of studies published claiming that our bodies are battling an onslaught of microplastics and nanoplastics have all been rejected by scientific agencies and the larger research community. But that does not stop the same foundation-funded media, universities and NGOs to amplify the findings and perpetuate the myths.
Technologies have not only accelerated new discoveries in industry research, but also advanced what we know today compared to what researchers in the 1950s knew. Activists though are judging research practices from 75 years ago with today’s technologies in their post-capitalist Marxist campaign to throw all industry research out. These anti-industry campaigners are demanding “independent” research which they assume is free from special interests and bias.
The assumption here is that independent research is free from conflicts of interest because, well, it’s independent. Given the costs of research technologies today, and government funding cutbacks, it is hard to imagine how funding could truly be free from special interests. It is not like in Albert Einstein’s time where he could develop his theories funded by his own third grade patent officer salary.
Foundations are providing a large amount of the “independent research” funding. But these are, at best, politically-motivated groups led by dogmatic philanthropists and, at worst, intermediaries channeling dark donor-advised funds from special interest groups. Michael Bloomberg’s latest $420 million commitment to tobacco control campaigns pushes him over the $2 billion funding mark for this single issue. He is staunchly against tobacco harm reduction alternatives like vaping or nicotine pouches and he is forcing the World Health Organization to follow his lead. It is unlikely that anyone within Bloomberg’s flotilla of well-funded NGO echochambers would do anything other than confirm his anti-nicotine bias (no matter how clear the science and data is).
Foundation-funded research is far worse and more corrupt than industry funded research. It is time to dispel the prejudice and myth.
Industry funds research to advance profitability and competitiveness. If the research is inadequate or corrupted, the products will not succeed and the company will lose market share, suffer litigation or have to pay clean-up costs. Poor methodology or integrity issues are not sustainable.
Foundation-funded research is campaign-directed (to show a substance is a health or environmental hazard). Its success is measured by how well it confirms some billionaire’s dogma or ideology. The methodology is defined by the desired conclusion and there is no real consequence for irresponsible research.
The Activist Endgame
Conclusions from “independent science” are fed into the activist campaigns, amplified and valued far more than industry research could ever be. So long as the well-funded NGO communicators keep pumping their dogma:
nobody will care about how many people return to smoking and face far worse health consequences thanks to Michael Bloomberg’s irrational bias.
Nobody will care how many more unsustainable, less innovative alternatives are used as the war on plastics leads to senseless policy decisions.
Nobody will care about the future of agriculture, soil health and food security should the activists succeed in banning important pesticides.
As these philanthropists are growing in power, funding the media, buying researchers, controlling the courts, producing films and defining the public narrative, we are being conditioned on what to think about the public goods and well-being we are rapidly losing. Nobody will likely care until the economy collapses, people go hungry or the bodies start piling up.
There’s a new sheriff in town, with deep pockets, so if you want to get anything done, you had better fall in line with the foundations’ rhetoric and fundamentalism. And don’t you dare question the legitimacy of the non-transparent, non-registered organizations, fiscal sponsors or dark donor-advised funds or you’ll be labeled an industry shill. The media, the regulators, the research community and the courts have been sucked into a prejudicial purgatory defined and amplified by the dogma of philanthropic billions rather than by rationality, productivity, innovation and sustainability.
Money is oxygen for communication campaigns and the arrival of professionalized foundations into the environmental health issue sphere has sucked all of the air out of the room. With their well-organized messaging, the public perceives foundation funding as benign – that philanthropists are forces for good – while industry funding is corrupt and designed to harm people for profit.
A scientist or activist can take millions from a foundation and still be welcome in their community while if they were to be even remotely associated with industry, they are excommunicated.
An investigative journalist paid by a foundation grant to cover a story of a campaign funded by that same foundation, publishing it in a mainstream media group receiving hundreds of millions from foundations, will have the article celebrated as great independent journalism.
The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (largely funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies) prohibits participation from anyone who is related (within four degrees) to someone with any type of tobacco interest. If your second cousin runs a vape shop, you are tainted. But if Michael Bloomberg says you are a legitimate organization, even if you don’t exist as an entity, you get a front-row seat at a WHO global conference.
The Firebreak has attempted, in a rather lonely manner, to provide solutions to stop the activist endgame. As a reminder, here are some recommendations.
There needs to be a distinction between humanitarian NGOs and activist lobby groups (Alternative Policy Enterprises or APEs). Funding of these APEs should not be tax deductible.
There needs to be transparency on the use of donor-advised funds. Special interest groups like tort law firms should not be allowed to secretly channel funding into research or media groups.
Billionaires creating or funding news organizations need to commit to the same objectivity and news balance requirements as public media groups … or they should be branded as propaganda outlets.
The fiscal sponsor loophole needs to be tightened up. We cannot continue to have faux-NGOs like Beyond Plastics or the Agroecology Fund running campaigns with hundreds of millions in foundation funding with no transparency, no disclosures and no accountability.
Universities need to disclose what funding they receive from which foundations and detail, transparently how and to whom the funds have been distributed (see Postscript).
Foundation-funded research, even if it were ever to be transparent and open, should be considered as having conflicts of interest in the same way industry-funded research is, and be treated likewise.
Courts and juries must be informed when cases are being brought on behalf of governments but fully funded by interest groups hiding behind foundation fiscal sponsors. See the Firebreak case studies on Sher Edling’s series of climate nuisance lawfare suits.
There are always interests. Special interests always have a smell. Industry interests are certainly not the worst smelling (even though other interest groups have tried to paint them as such).
The biggest unseen problem is how easy it is for one person with a network and an unlimited foundation commitment to create a stream of bad science and policy campaigns. As a case study, we should consider the work of one person who claims to conduct independent research: Philip Landrigan.
Postscript: A Serial Scientific Sales Rep
Philip Landrigan’s mischievous activism keeps turning up in Firebreak reports. His recent work promoting the anti-plastics campaign highlighted how deep the conflict of interest issue is within the so-called independent science community. Landrigan’s work over the last decade is a good illustration of how an individual has done very well providing scientific-like answers that the foundations and other special interest groups have paid him for. What is less evident is the game of smoke and mirrors that Landrigan uses to hide these interests.
Here are a list of organizations that Landrigan is using to channel funds for different projects (and himself). It is very difficult to access the amounts that have been funded since foundations are generally not transparent (nor is Boston College), but today most impact funding projects like those mentioned below are funded in the range of millions of dollars. The details have been gathered by Copilot (directed, structured and checked by the author).
Landrigan retired from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2015 although he remained a full professor and Dean for Global Health at Mount Sinai until 2018.
Landrigan set up the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good in 2018 at Boston College.
Landrigan set up the Global Observatory on Planetary Health in 2018 at Boston College. It presently employs one other scientist, Ramazzini confrere, Kurt Straif.
While Boston College states that “The Observatory is the research arm of the Global Public Health Program”, there are no cases of joint projects outside of the two organizations sharing the same founder and director (ie, Landrigan).
Landrigan joined the Centre Scientifique de Monaco in 2019 to co‑chair the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution.
Officially, the Global Observatory on Planetary Health partnered directly with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco and the Prince Albert II Foundation rather than via Landrigan himself.
The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Centre Scientifique de Monaco since 2018 for ocean research, including plastics.
Landrigan was advising the Heartland Study team in 2018 while serving as chair of the Ramazzini Institute Science Advisory Committee. The Heartland Health Research Alliance was officially formed in 2020.
In 2018, Landrigan transferred $950,000 from the Heartland Study accounts to the Ramazzini Institute for their glyphosate research. On the Heartland IRS 990 form, the transfer was made to Boston College. There was no declaration or records whether this money was channeled through his newly formed Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good, his newly formed Global Observatory on Planetary Health or via Boston College.
Landrigan only acknowledged this 2018 transfer to the Ramazzini Institute where he headed the Science Advisory Board, in 2023 and this was only due to a change in management at the Heartland Health Research Alliance (that took compliance and integrity more seriously than the previous management).
Heartland Health Research Alliance, created as a fiscal sponsor to fund the Heartland Health Study, gets its funding from the litigation industry and the organic food industry lobby via foundations using anonymous, donor-advised funds. There is very limited transparency. Philip Landrigan chairs Heartland’s Science Advisory Board and Boston College (assumedly via one of Landrigan’s operations) is a Heartland partner.
Kurt Straif leaves IARC and begins working for Boston College with his Ramazzini confrere at the Global Observatory on Planetary Health as a Visiting Professor in 2019, formally becoming a Research Professor and Co‑Director at the Observatory in 2022. Straif and Landrigan are the only staff listed on the website.
Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Global Observatory and is also one of its formal partners.
The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health was created in 2022 with an undisclosed amount of funding from the Minderoo Foundation, the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM) and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health is coordinated by the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, namely Philippe Landrigan, who has served as the lead scientist.
The The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics was designed to provide global monitoring of the impact of plastics on human health and the environment. It was launched in 2025 with principal funding from Minderoo, in collaboration with Boston College, Heidelberg University, and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM). It was coordinated by Landrigan’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health.
The Lancet Countdown Report, with Landrigan as the lead author, contained a 95-line declaration of interests for the authors (with most funding for the plastics researchers coming from foundations including a good number acknowledging funding from the Minderoo Foundation).
The Minderoo Foundation was created by the Australian billionaire, Andrew Forrest, executive chairman of the Fortescue Metals Group. As a main supplier of iron ore that goes into iron and steel, Fortescue will expand its markets considerably should plastics be banned or severely restricted.
The main journal articles related to these activities, with Landrigan as the lead author, have mostly been published in the Annals of Global Health journal. While the journal claims to be founded in 1934 by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (as the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine), it is supported operationally by Boston College’s Program for Global Public Health (ie, Philip Landrigan). The journal was dormant after 2014 and it transitioned from a general medical journal to a global health journal focusing on “planetary‑health and prevention science” with the new publishing process finalized in 2019.
Since the reorganization in 2018-2019, Philip Landrigan has been the Editor‑in‑Chief of the Annals of Global Health journal.
In 2025, the Minderoo Foundation made a five million dollar donation to the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation for their ReOcean pollution campaign. It had previously funded the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution (co‑chaired by Landrigan)
In 2026, Philip Landrigan appears multiple times in the Minderoo Foundation funded film, The Plastic Detox.
Prior to 2018, Landrigan had not done any research or published any articles on plastics.
There are no public records or declarations of funding or budgets for the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good or the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. Boston College, as fiscal sponsor, does not declare the source and use of funding for these two Landrigan operations (which do not exist as standalone entities).
While Landrigan is core to all of these activities, most of his work is done via other organizations, several of which are shell organizations created by him at the same time as foundation funding was made available and moved around. Philip Landrigan is leaving us in the dark about his funding while promoting groups like the Ramazzini Institute for their “independent” funding.
How can Landrigan’s research activities be considered independent science free from conflicts of interest? How are these conflicts of interest not worse than industry-funded research?