Roger Bate

Roger Bate is an economist who researches international health policy, with a particular focus on tropical disease and substandard and counterfeit medicines. He also writes on general development policy in Asia and Africa. He writes regularly for AEI's Health Policy Outlook. He founded the European Science and Environment Forum, a biotech, tobacco, and chemical industry front-group. In the mid-1990s, Bate was an employee of the right-wing British think tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA). He had also worked with the free-market think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the United States. In 1998, he published an article in the United Kingdom paper Financial Times attacking the idea of regulating secondhand smoke, cigarette advertising and health warning labels on cigarette packs. He also published an article criticizing the World Health Organization (WHO), which argued that the WHO was trying to eliminate individual freedom. In the mid 1990s, Bate ran the "Environmental Unit" of the IEA, which took positions to counter health and environmental activism IEA received funding from British American Tobacco (BAT)'s department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs CORA, among others. Bate countered environmentalists' global warming assertions with a skeptical view of the science. Bate joined others, such as Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform -- key strategist of Newt Gingrich's Republican Party faction), Fran Smith (editor of Consumer Alert - a corporate funded "consumer" magazine) and a number of other business lobby organisations, in taking a skeptical view on the issue of global warming.