“Harvard dean made $150,000 as witness in Tylenol suits”

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I came across the above-titled article in the newspaper today:

The dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, who consulted with top Trump health officials ahead of Monday’s warning about Tylenol and autism, was paid at least $150,000 to serve as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in lawsuits against the maker of Tylenol.

Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, a leading epidemiologist, disclosed the figure in a court deposition he gave in the summer of 2023 that is publicly available in federal court filings and was reviewed by The New York Times. He had previously disclosed that he had served as an expert witness in the case but not how much money he had made.

A federal judge dismissed the suits for lack of reliable scientific evidence. . . .

In the decision to dismiss the lawsuits, the judge, Denise Cote, agreed with lawyers for the defendants that Dr. Baccarelli had “cherry-picked and misrepresented study results” in his testimony and was therefore “unreliable.”

”I work for more than 200 hours, so it’s about $150,000,” Dr. Baccarelli said in the deposition.

Hmmm . . . $150,000/200 = $750/hour. That’s pretty close to my consulting rate of $800/hour.

I’ll tell ya this: if you want me to cherry pick and misrepresent study results, you’re gonna have to pay me a lot more than $750 an hour, bud.

(That was just a joke. I will never cherry pick and misrepresent study results. That’s not what I do as a consultant.)

It’s funny how the whole Harvard thing gets slung around. A government official is quoted as saying:

“But, to quote the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health: ‘There is a causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders of A.D.H.D. and autism spectrum disorder.’”

Harvard . . . isn’t that where that Surgisphere guy worked? Harvard’s the place that promoted the Gospel of Jesus’s wife? And Harvard’s the place where they did the bad research on mind-body healing, and the place where they said “the replication rate in psychology is quite high—indeed, it is statistically indistinguishable from 100%”. And where the preening disgraced primatologist used to work? The home of the law school plagiarist with a penchant for bowling metaphors. I even heard a rumor that there was a Harvard statistics professor who made 2 million dollars consulting for cigarette companies.

All right, then.

33 thoughts on ““Harvard dean made $150,000 as witness in Tylenol suits””

  2. I don’t find the rate exorbitant. 200 hours (granted, he said more than, but just being quick and dirty…and it’s also “more than” 150k) is 25 days of work, at 8 hour days (granted, he might have worked 10s, but keeping it simple). So that’s $6,000/day.

    I do day rate strategy consulting (head down, butt up work, not opining as some sooper-Ivy) and get a rate less than half of that. But it’s for more sustained work.

    I remember in the late 90s, the day rate for expert witnessing that the profs all threw out was $3000/day. Using the CPI calculator for 30 years (DEC95 to DEC25), I get $3,000 then converted into $6,300 now. So…it really just looks like standard expert witness pay.

    I would note that it didn’t seem like those profs could not really “get” expert witness gigs as much as they wanted. It was mostly some plum that was rare and they heard about. Certainly not if you factor across all of them at R1 unis, not just the BSDs.

    And they were selling prestige, not just analysis, obviously. So they were buying his name (and his resume, and probably even the association with current gig).

    And there’s some pressure to make the story come out to benefit your client. It’s not some omniscient, objective analysis.

    I do think it’s interesting that he was doing 25 days of side gig work within a year. Obviously he was not all in on the main gig. And he also liked getting the 150K. It mattered to him.

    FWIW, I have hired academics (profs or students or postdocs), at what was a very nice part time rate, for specialized R&D or brainstorming workshops. But we paid half the expert witness rate and we required them to do actual work. I was pretty clear with the profs that this was not a “look important” thing (in this science field, they are all basically research administrators, rarely get hands dirty doing things). Some of them were OK with it…some of them just said use my student or postdoc. Overall, the interactions were quite positive for them and us. But mostly because I knew how their minds worked and made brutally clear that this was not an expert witness gig.

    P.s. I don’t know the specifics of this painkiller bruhaha. Didn’t even know it was “a thing”. Am not a pregnant woman, don’t use painkillers, and stopped getting the paper years ago.

    P.s.s. Enjoing the Harvard sneer at the end. (I went to the “unHarvard”, Canoe U.)

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    • Anon:

      In writing that you don’t find the rate exorbitant, you’re missing the point of my post, was that his rate was too low! As I wrote above, if you want me to cherry pick and misrepresent study results, you’re gonna have to pay me a lot more than $750 an hour.

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      • Not really. I read the whole post and saw the different parts of it, the rate and the ethical conflict. Feel like I responded with what I’ve seen on my own as well as with comments on both aspects. I mean…I’m a dunderhead. But wasn’t here. Just wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about. (I did see what you said.)

        Moving on:

        1. I wouldn’t completely rule out that he might have worked a lot less hours than were actually billed. (And with implicit acceptance of the client. It’s a big $$ case and the 150k is a drop in the bucket of the fees) I’m not saying he did. Just…maybe. As in my earlier post, it’s not like “expert witness” is really head-down, butt-up work in general…getting hands dirty, doing complicated Excel, etc. etc. They are buying his name, resume, prestige. Even in cases where there’s no blatant disingenuousness, there’s always an implicit pull of what solution the client wants to come out of the work (or what testimony in the trial). To an extent this conflict exists in strategy consulting also…but I would wager it is higher in expert witness, legal gigs. And I still get some strategy gigs that are relatively “pure”, client under the gun during M&A auction and just wants fast, good analysis…and the actual answer, not what some exec wants to hear (although like I said, some strategy gigs, there is pressure to come out with the answer that benefits the hiring executive…but generally not that awful…but I was uncomfortable with gigs where there was too much of that pressure.)

        2. It is interesting how people’s minds work on things like this. Costing double the flight dollars to get some FF points. I wouldn’t do that, but many consultants do. And they wouldn’t if it were a vacation flight (not expensed). I’m not talking about a more convenient flight…on that I agree with spending the extra dollars as things are always in a massive rush and the consultant is a bottleneck, so having him (me) less frazzled by going direct, versus a connection makes total sense.

        3. (similar to 2, but new para). I’ve also seen interesting info from hiring expert witnesses via GLG or Alphasights (sp?). To me, there’s a huge conflict with people’s current or past employer nondiscolusure agreements. But I am very good at running these interviews and get huge amounts of information from them, that is non-public. It’s not blatant info on an upcoming project or the like, but you can get a lot of info on margins, market share, etc. that is technically not allowed. And GLG has all sorts of guidelines and the like to try to fig leaf over not getting inside info, but the risk is all on the interviewee side…and I am very good at being he business consultant version of a psychiatrist, getting my patient on the couch, telling his story. An it ends up getting transformed into NPVs or pie charts or Mekko charts, becomes quantitative. But…my whole point about this is people are doing these interviews for a few hundred bucks an hour (it’s well over a thousand per hour to the intermediary as they need a margin). But I just feel like huge info/risk/violation of NDAs is going on…and for a relatively paltry fee (all in, not the “per hour”, since the standard time is basically an hour). So…my point is really more, it is interesting how people will sell themselves cheaply! And very high executives at that. My hourly rate is much lower, but I always charge at least a week (and work it). But I’m not an SME in anything either. And I won’t sell out previous clients or employers.

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        • IOW, I was mostly agreeing with you, and or responding to the article itself. But putting my own thoughts down and sharing anecdotal facts. Not constrained to (what you see) as main point.

        • It’s been a minute, but back when I did EW work it absolutely was head up/butt down work (and apparently I was not nearly charging enough!). Then I moved positions where it went from consulting to job duties, and man, that sucked. Defendant has $1000/hr attorneys in $5k suits and they are pretty good at looking for a crack, any crack. I have a disinterested AG nominally monitoring the depo, but mostly looking for the clock to get to 5. This is wildfire reconstruction for cost recovery to the government for their costs in putting the fire out. Good times (when viewed in the mirror). I learned a lot about civil lawsuits and process and all, but overall left a very bad taste in my mouth and have no interest in that kind of work despite opportunity. The case here in this thread seems to solidify that feeling.

        • Thanks, man. You’ve been in the trenches. I haven’t done it. Just sharing the little hand on the random part of the elephant I had seen.

          If I were studying this for a client (market size, segmentation, rates, intermediaries, issues, etc.), I would probably do some GLG interviews with a Skadden Arps (or equivalent) employee or ex employee that had a holistic knowledge of hiring said experts. You could evaluate it as a market/industry.

          There’s probably already some secondary research on the expert witness thing. Haven’t even Googled it. ;) I’m part of the low value portion of the 200,000 comment segment of that market. I didn’t even go to Harvard. ;)

      • Anon and dsapsis, even though you say you’re not missing the point, I think you’re missing the point. The point can be expressed this way: the relevant question is not “what is a reasonable amount to charge for expert testimony”, it’s “what is a reasonable amount to charge for expert testimony that you know to be false?”

        I’m reminded of the old saw that the scandal isn’t that politicians can be bought, it’s how cheap they are.

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    • Oh, I hadn’t caught that! Good thing Columbia got rid of this guy. I have no respect for someone who’s willing to cherry pick and misrepresent study results for the low low price of $750/hour. Show some self-respect, dude!

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      • Should charge higher rate. Easily 10k an hour. Front page reading “Former Columbia Chair” does not have the same ring as Harvard Dean. I find this case interesting, mostly cause the parent company of Tylenol used to be J&J and they moved Tylenol to a different subdivision…and well J&J is not an innocent company, they hid the baby powder gives you cancer studies.

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  5. How much would an expert witness whose testimony is not readily dismissed by the judge charge? I reviewed a case for a plaintiff once and told the attorney that his client had screwed up. I was not invited to present my findings in court. I don’t understand the assertive certainty behind a lot of expert testimony at least the way it is presented in the media. An expert witness has an obligation to be an expert not an advocate, and categorical certainty is hard to come by on this planet.

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    • As someone who worked for 35 years at an expert witness consulting firm (mostly in-house experts, but occasionally employing academics to testify) the central lesson is that the client hiring you is completely uninterested in “assisting the finder of fact with specialized knowledge.” They want someone who will help them win the case! (Of course, getting blown up by the judge fails on both counts.) The person playing the repeated game here is the consultant — if you want a 35 year career, your reputation *for the rest of your career* is on the line every time you raise your right hand. So, in my experience, the other side is much less of a hindrance than your own side, who pushes for more certainty and more vehemence; the successful witnesses over the long term are the ones who push back, but leave themselves with easily defensible claims that support the client’s case. (I leave it to game theorists to do the backward recursion from my retirement date.)

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      • Jonathan:

        Yeah, it’s that very last consulting engagement that’s the best: You can let loose and not worry about your reputation at all!

        This reminds me of our discussion of the John Yoo line: the point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously, and so you might as well become a hack because you have no scholarly reputation remaining. This happens to some academics, that they start with guarded pronouncements, and then at some point they realize that they’ve blown up their scholarly reputation and they decide to just let loose.

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    • Oncodoc:

      I’ve consulted a few times and done a couple of depositions but have never been called to testify in court. I remember once I was talking with the lawyer from the side that had hired me. He was preparing me possible testimony. I did my summary and then he asked me, Are you sure about that? I responded that I can just about never be sure: I do make mistakes, after all. The lawyer told me I shouldn’t say that. I asked him then what I should say. He gave me a good answer, but I don’t remember what it was!

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      • Sometimes worse. When it’s a very small group of experts they call you and try to put you on retainer without actually doing it to get you x’ed out. Just agree or discuss the possibility of a case without executing it. Happened with the Tunnel Fire and my whole lab and one other time directly (both unsuccessful)

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    • I remember readng the “expert” testimony of a psychiatrist or psychologist, I think he was a psychologist.

      His “expert” knowledge of Islamic practices seemed to come from a fevered imagination and a book a Danish psychologist/criminologist wrote about young Muslim men in a Danish prison. Of course, he had not read the book since he did not read Danish but he had spoken with the author.

      His actual knowledge of Islam seemed to be very close to zero. The term hired gun came to mind.

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  6. This may be a hammer-nail thing, but when I read stuff like the OP, I think “compensating wage differentials”. There must be some disutility in cherry-picking and misrepresenting research if you’re a conventionally trained researcher, right? So you ought to demand more money for doing it. But once again the theory fails; the guy did all the nasty stuff and still didn’t get paid more for it. That’s too bad. If dishonest EW’s were paid a premium, clever economists could calculate a value of statistical lies (VSL). That could be useful in deciding how stringently to enforce perjury and other statutes.

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    • There was a book, What Price the Moral High Ground, by Robert Frank that explored the compensating wage differentials for working for evil (he used more moderate terms, I think) companies.

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        • Are you suggesting that the ICE bonus payments are compensating wages for the distasteful work they have to do? If only. I fear they would do their work for a discount. I guess Frank implicitly assumed that we all have the same moral standards, so that distasteful work for you is the same as for me. If tastes for the work are polarized, then the effect on wages becomes difficult to identify – does it become an inverted U shape, where wages are highest for work that is neither horrendous or ethical, but lower at both extremes?

        • Hey, it’s a classic matching problem! There are some jobs that entail brutality and sadism, and there are some potential workers who get positive utility (or maybe less negative) from this. So a proper market will sort them optimally, and we will have thugs for thuggish jobs. We recall from compensating differential theory that what we are supposedly measuring is the marginal, not the average valuation. (Cue Sherwin Rosen.)

  7. Peter: your 4:52 post suggests that there should be a concept of anti-matching. To take a banally practical example, suppose you were hired to clean up ICE and wanted to hire the least thuggish agents but had no way to directly observe the thuggishness of applicants. How could you align incentives or market signals or whatever? But is there also a move general concept that could be formulated and applied (whether for scientifically valuable purposes or amusement)? Do some existing systems or social phenomenon systematically place people in (more or less) the worst matches (by some criterion)? Is there an existing literature (as Tyler Cowen says there is of everything)?

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    • Not sure about your second question, but the first seems like a problem of re-matching. In your example, the current recruitment campaign for ICE draws on Christian nationalism, right wing paramilitary memes and similar come-ons to attract the types best suited for the work DHS intends for them. If I were to clean out ICE (really, getting rid of them is much more effective in a chaotic political environment), I would rebrand the work and change the recruitment appeal to something along the lines of “pitch in for a safer, more caring community!” with images of volunteers helping those in need, smiling families picking up trash on a neighborhood cleanup day, etc. Then I should get the sort of anti-thugs I’m looking for without having to do a lot of vetting and paying out big wage premiums. The remaining problem is, what about the incumbent thugs? That will be a big mess, and it’s one reason why ending the program and starting something better from scratch is the way to go.

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  8. There probably is but I have not been looking for it. On the other hand there is an extensive literature on authoritarianism. The wiki on “Authoritarianism” is a good, quick” intro to the concept. For an out-of-date but extensive review of the field see Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians.

    In the Authoritarian literature a person high on the Authoritarian Scale is submissive to authority. What in normal usage would be called an “Authoritarian” is termed a person high on Social Dominance Orientation scale. The terminology is an historical artifact dating from early research done by Theodor Adorno starting back in the late 1940s or early 1950’s and can cause all sorts of confusion .

    Here is the abstract fron an Altemeyer article on i>Social Dominance Orientation

    Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities

    The author considered the small part of the population whose members score highly on both the Social Dominance Orientation scale and the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. Studies of these High SDO-High RWAs, culled from samples of nearly 4,000 Canadian university students and over 2600 of their parents and reported in the present article, reveal that these dominating authoritarians are among the most prejudiced persons in society. Furthermore, they seem to combine the worst elements of each kind of personality, being power-hungry, unsupportive of equality, manipulative, and amoral, as social dominators are in general, while also being religiously ethnocentric and dogmatic, as right-wing authoritarians tend to be. The author suggested that, although they are small in number, such persons can have considerable impact on society because they are well-positioned to become the leaders of prejudiced right-wing political movements.

    The Journal of Social Psychology https://doi.org/10.3200/SOCP.144.4.421-448

    It may remind you of your favourite politician or boss.

    Warning: The Authoritarians is a very interesting and entertaining book but is self-published, has any numbers of diversions ,and Bob after a long career in psychology which very strongly discourages footnotes seems to have gone footnote mad. I read the book in .PDF format with two browsers, one for the main text and another for the footnotes.

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