David Michaels was head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) during the Obama administration. This is the most important worker health and safety post in the U.S. Michaels reveals how corporations continued to sell products that were harmful to people.
Michaels has published two excellent but disturbing books. Doubt Is their Product – How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health was written before his seven-year term at OSHA. The Triumph of Doubt – Dark Money and the Science of Deception was written afterwards.
Michaels meticulously documents how corporations and complacent government agencies debase science. They conceal the health and safety risks posed by our industry-dominated society. He describes the tactics of the “product defense” industry. It is composed of lawyers, public relations experts and hired-gun scientists who specialize in manufacturing scientific uncertainty and doubt.
Corporations hire product defense firms to delay regulatory and legal action when evidence emerges that their products and activities are causing harm to workers, the public, and the environment. They have successfully defended the tobacco, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, asbestos, automobile, mining, alcohol, nuclear, and pesticide industries, among many others.
Corporate funding for scientists that publicly deny climate change is one example of product defense. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most work is done out of public view, targeting regulatory agencies. These agencies were created to protect workers and the public, but end up being “captured” by industry.
Michaels’ greatest victory at OSHA was saving the lives of workers exposed to silica dust. After an epic 5-year battle, OSHA created a new silica standard in 2017. Soon thereafter, tools with vacuum or wetting devices became standard equipment on construction sites, in foundries, and other workplaces.
Michaels notes that U.S. miners are still unprotected against lung cancer and other silica dust related diseases. Their workplaces fall under a Mine Safety and Health Administration that is wholly captured by industry. Canadian miners who received harmful “McIntyre Powder” treatments, supposedly to protect against silica dust, only recently won their battle for compensation.
Michaels documents an astounding range of tricks used by the pharmaceutical industry to get products of questionable benefit through testing and onto the market, sometimes with tragic results. A 1999 clinical trial of the pain relief drug Vioxx found that it caused heart attacks. But the manufacturer, Merck, persuaded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ignore this result. Merck then falsely claimed that a comparison pain reliever used in the trial prevented heart attacks, exonerating Vioxx.
The FDA later calculated that before Vioxx was pulled off the market in 2004 it caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, probably 30-40% of them fatal. Health Canada had also approved Vioxx. This prompted a 2005 Canadian Medical Association editorial calling on it to learn from its mistakes.
Michaels cites other Big Pharma tricks: funding many trials but publishing only those that make a drug look good, publishing results of a single trial many times and claiming that multiple studies reached the same conclusion, publishing only the part of a trial that yielded positive results, and testing a drug against too low a dose of the comparison drug.
Corporations’ product defense tactics constitute “truth decay.”
Governments also conceal risks of technologies — particularly their own. A cover-up of death and illness among Britain’s nuclear weapons test veterans was recently revealed. Seven successive U.K. governments knew that military personnel exposed to nuclear bomb radiation were far more likely to get cancer, but each hid that evidence.
In 2008 the Government of Canada announced an Atomic Veterans Recognition Program. It gave 700 veterans who were at U.K. and U.S. bomb testing sites, and 200 veterans who cleaned up after Canadian nuclear accidents, $24,000 each. But compensation for civilian workers who dealt with nuclear accidents at Chalk River in the 1950s only began this past February 1st, after years of effort.
Governments and corporations alike fear the costs of compensating victims of workplace hazards and unsafe products. They respond by denying or obscuring the scientific evidence. Delaying action until as many affected people as possible have died is morally reprehensible, but sadly represents standard practice.
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