Epidemiology is why California is a scientific joke around the world, with Proposition 65 'cancer' warnings on 80,000 products that have led to no decline in cancers. Just much higher costs on common products, which unfairly impacts the poor most.
The motivation is money. Not just grant funding, the reason Harvard School of Public Health promotes some new Miracle Diet every three months while National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences claims some harmless chemical can be "linked" to cancer twice per week. Also trial lawyer money. If you are with France's International Agency for Research on Cancer and know they are going to "correlate" a weedkiller to human cancer - a head-scratcher for actual scientists, who know plants are not little people any more than rats are - you can sign a consulting contract for a lawyer before the determined-in-advance result is even published and get a nice six-figure bonus. It's not a $160,000 bonus for producing the result environmental lawyers need for lawsuits *wink wink* you are an "expert witness."
If it's in Guardian, the official paper of the anti-science left, it is okay to dismiss it.
Any organization that comes into existence like wants to stay in existence. Even charitable foundations rarely have a sunset clause where their job is done. After the big win in showing smoking causes cancer (we obviously did not do clinical trials on humans with cigarettes) everyone in epidemiology wanted to find the next Big Tobacco conspiracy. But they were soon out of legitimate carcinogens. So smog pollution, PM10, got reduced by 75% and epidemiologists weirdly began correlating PM2.5 - particulate matter so small you need an electron microscope to see it - to kids getting worse grades in school or being fat.
Have you read that pickle juice and aloe vera are linked to cancer? If you haven't, you are no less safe, because epidemiologists don't care about dose, they only care about hazard. One ounce of pickle juice is the same as drinking 78 gallons of it, and if a rat is fed the rodent equivalent of 78 gallons of it and get disease, get that paper into a journal.
All it took for progressives to become pro-vaccine was for their party to be for the COVID-19 once they could steal credit for it, which caused Republicans to be against it. Poor people would be much better off if Republicans took a stand against nuclear energy and GMOs, because then journalists would write about how stupid they are and even electric cars would be affordable.
PFAS is the latest rage for statisticians who get treated like scientists in corporate media, despite there being no plausible biological mechanism for how anyone could get enough in thelr lifetime to be harmed. Prior to that, BPA was pulled from products not because it was harmful - scientists who investigated it found it had 1/20,000th the effect of natural estrogen in food - but because epidemiology flunkies for environmental marketing departments scared new mothers about it.
The American Cancer Society is no stranger to monetizing fad epidemiology claims. They raised a lot of money based on epidemiology claims about resveratrol and other suspect fads. Yet every so often they remind us about actual risk. Not conflating absolute and relative risk for media attention, but risk for everyone, by noting that cigarettes, alcohol, and obesity are all risk-factors that compound the impact of natural aging.
If you live long enough, you're going to get cancer. Avoid cigarettes, avoid getting drunk, avoid too many calories with no exercise, and your risk goes way down.
However, any company (you, Smirnoff) or government group that claims their Non-GMO whiskey is healthier than the regular kind, or that pipes, cigars, and vaping are just as dangerous as cigarettes, or that the pizza box is worse for your health than eating too much pizza, is selling you something.
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