Comment 14QA7 Re: Won't stop

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Meet the ‘rented white coats’ who defend toxic chemicals

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Won't stop (Score: 1)

by fishybell@pipedot.org on 2016-02-21 19:50 (#14PCC)

This won't stop until people are prosecuted and sent to jail. That won' happen until there are laws on the books criminalizing this behavior. That won't happen until the same corporations peddling this information aren't the same corporations that buy politicians.

USA! USA! USA!

Re: Won't stop (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-02-22 05:14 (#14QA7)

It's actually very, very difficult to prosecute because they can always claim it's just a different interpretation of the same data, or certain details weren't known at the time, or the means of measuring have changed, or whatever. All of those are legitimate issues that have come up time and again, so it wouldn't be hard to use them as an excuse for your asbestos-is-a-safe-food-additive paper. Look at Robert Kehoe, the man who's most famous for telling us that tetraethyl lead was safe, he got his start at Kettering Labs "proving" that the known carcinogen naphthylamine was actually perfectly safe for use in paints, and went on from there. It took decades of fighting by some US cancer foundation whose name escapes me at the moment to get this overturned. So if it's that hard to overturn bought research "proving" that a carcinogen that produces cancer in nine out of ten employees exposed to it is safe, imagine how hard it'd be to overturn something far more vague.

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2016-02-22 18:07 Informative +1 bryan@pipedot.org

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2016-05-06 23:02