Doubt is their Product
kkrisberg | February 17, 2017The anti-vaxxers were out again this week, spreading misinformation and debunked science about an intervention that’s saved millions of lives and prevented immeasurable human suffering. It’s unconscionable.
That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who — to repeat — is not a doctor, not a scientist, not a public health practitioner, not an expert in vaccinology. Regardless, he told the press earlier this year that President Trump had asked him to chair a vaccine safety commission, even though the country already has one of those — it’s called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and…
kkrisberg | December 20, 2016At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes:
Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat…
cmonforton | October 28, 2013Earlier this month I wrote about the merits of policies that require conflict of interest disclosures. Last week, two items also about conflicts of interest landed in my in-box. They were just too juicy to not take a bite, and write about here.
First came a commentary from the October 2013 issue of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene written by the journal’s chief editor Noah Seixas, PhD, MS. The lead paragraph reads:
"On 6 June 2013, a court in New York handed down a decision that calls into question the validity of research that was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific [GP] and published in eight…
egrossman | October 23, 2013On October 17, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that it has classified air pollution as a human carcinogen. Although the composition of air pollution and exposure levels vary widely from place to place, IARC says its assessment is applicable worldwide and notes that exposures in rapidly industrializing countries with large populations have increased significantly in recent years. According to the IARC review of the latest scientific studies, exposure to air pollution increases the risk for lung cancer and for bladder cancer. IARC…
sb admin | March 3, 2009New awards for 2008 books are coming out, and we're proud to announce that David Michaels' Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health has won recognition from both the Library Journal and the American Association of Publishers.
Library Journal's Gregg Sapp has selected Doubt is Their Product as one of the Best Sci-Tech Books of 2008, and the American Association of Publishers has selected it as a finalist for their PROSE Award.
sb admin | September 8, 2008Last month, David Michaels spoke to Google employees about his book Doubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, and Google has now posted the video on YouTube as part of their Authors@Google series.
The Google employees asked astute questions (starting around the 31-minute mark), touching on freedom of speech issues; what industry scientists should do about manufactured uncertainty (this from a former industry research scientist); international regulation; and the relative costs of workplace illnesses and profits.
The videoâs below the fold:
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Thereâs…
sb admin | July 15, 2008When Iâm teaching a class or speaking to a group about the "funding effect" â the close correlation between the results desired by a studyâs funders and those reported by the researchers â people often ask how researchers do it. How is it that researchers paid by a sponsor usually get results favorable to the study's sponsor?
I've try to help answer that question in an article that appears in todayâs Washington Post, entitled It's Not the Answers That Are Biased, It's the Questions. (A longer discussion of the funding effect is in my book Doubt is Their Product).
Having a financial stake in…
sb admin | May 9, 2008The Weinberg Group is one of the product defense firms I write about in my new book âDoubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.â These firms help polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products avoid regulation â only now the Weinberg Group is not a product defense firm, itâs transformed itself into a âproduct supportâ firm.
Changes to the companyâs website, like transforming the âProduct Defenseâ category of services to âProduct Support,â suggest that the Weinberg Group has a new awareness of its online audience â itâs no longer just potential clients…
sb admin | May 5, 2008The May 12th issue of Newsweek contains Sharon Begleyâs excellent review of Doubt is Their Product (which should now be available in your local bookstore). Naturally, we like it because it says nice things about Davidâs book, but we also think Begley does a terrific job describing the kinds of abuses the book chronicles. Itâs not surprising to see her giving a pithy summary of how polluters manufacture uncertainty, since she wrote last yearâs Newsweek cover story âGlobal-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine,â which provides one of the best overviews of the global warming denial movement…
sb admin | April 17, 2008Doubt is Their Product is the focus of the second piece in a three-part series by Slateâs Daniel Engber on âradical skepticism and the rise of conspiratorial thinking about science.â After describing the strategy of manufacturing doubt, from its tobacco-industry roots to its use by energy and drug companies and politicians, Engber suggests that anti-regulatory forces arenât the only ones using it. His perspective is an interesting and useful one for those of us who are immersed in the scientific back-and-forth and might not realize how the general public views the issues.
In the first in his…
sb admin | April 9, 2008Even though the Vanity Fair Green Issue features an excellent piece on Monsanto (which, in addition to its long history of toxic contamination, now has a reputation for ruthless legal campaigns against small farmers), we here at The Pump Handle were most excited to see this sentence on the book review page:
In Doubt is Their Product (Oxford), David Michaels calls out the corporationsâyou'll recognize themâthat bankroll lobbyists and unethical scientists to attack the factual evidence that their products, such as asbestos, lead, and tobacco, are deadly.
Weâve just posted the Introduction of…
sb admin | April 2, 2008My book Doubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2008 ) will be officially released May 1st (though itâs available now through Amazon and Powellâs), and I'll be writing and speaking more about it over the next several weeks. The book reports on the way scientists working for "product defense" consulting firms manufacture uncertainty in order to help polluters and producers of dangerous products avoid or delay public health and environmental regulation.
Iâm fortunate that Doubt is Their Product has already been reviewed by two…