David Michaels (2) (1954–)

It is so refreshing to read David Michaels’ The Triumph of Doubt. He has the facts researched, vetted and thoroughly cited, and is not afraid to lay blame, call people liars and companies frauds. He is clear-thinking, organized and direct. At one point he recites a long list of claims by Big Sugar as to how truly benign their product is, and the last line is “None of this is true.” He calls climate skeptics climate terrorists because they are doing severe damage and causing vast numbers of deaths with their lies. He says what they all have in common is manufacturing uncertainty to keep the market confused.

The book uses Big Tobacco’s decades-long battle to put off the inevitable (while continuing to rake in billions) as the blueprint that everyone is copying in their similar quests. They all want to keep killing their customers as well as innocent bystanders while profiting exorbitantly from dangerous products and practices. The playbook was actually created in the early fifties by Big Sugar, which already saw the writing on the wall at that time. Its campaign chief moved over to the tobacco version when Hill & Knowlton created it at the end of 1953. That’s how long ago Big Tobacco knew the end was in sight. The tactics were to deny and deflect, to produce bogus studies refuting real studies, to create and finance fake grassroots support groups and industry support groups, and to place endless articles in both scientific journals and mass media by financing their authors.

The (desired) result is always confusion in the marketplace, as talk shows and magazine articles fall for the industry-approved stories and promote their diversions. We’ve all heard or seen them: It doesn’t matter how much sugar you consume as long as you exercise, that athletes are immune to concussions because they brace for it, and that opioids are not addictive for people who are not already addicted. How does anyone know what is real with all the contradictory stories? How did we get to this state of affairs?

Michaels explains it all matter-of-factly, because this is a well-worn playbook by now. For example, he says: “The tobacco strategists also realized that they couldn’t mount their own studies, which would take years and millions of dollars, so they figured they could get the raw data from the incriminating studies, change some of the basic assumptions, change the parameters, tinker with this and that, and make the results go away. Tobacco’s approach is now commonplace; ‘re-analysis’ is its own cottage industry within product defense.“ It kept lawmakers at bay for an additional 50 years.

He deeply probes the new industry of professional deniers that has grown out of Big Tobacco’s need for distraction. For decades, the same names and the same firms show up at congressional hearings and in court, publish refutable studies and challenge all the true studies, which they simply attack as faulty and inadequate. The same individuals are instantly experts in every field. They love to say “more study is needed” and “the causal connection has not been proven” to send everyone back to square one. In the US system, they’re allowed to. Michaels names them all – something to watch for in future controversies. Known liars and frauds should be outed, and at very least, their claims ignored.

They have convinced Congress to enact laws that for example, require federal agencies to use only studies provided to them by the industry they are overseeing. This was after getting those agencies to have to hand over all their own raw data so the industry could twist and refute it. With these advantages, industry could and does challenge every line in every report, forcing the agency to go back and create a thorough rebuttal to the criticism. This can add years to any process. Whatever industry has to pay for it, it’s worth it. In the interim, customers die.

Michaels has had a front row seat to all this. For seven years in the Obama administration he headed OSHA, which regulates safety in workplaces. He has written widely and deeply on the topic of doubt, and has been called to testify under oath numerous times. His credibility is unassailable, though the industry flacks keep trying. His whole life has been epidemiology, how disease spreads, so he holds his own in these proceedings with total confidence. He says he has no worries about any of the claims he makes in the book. Bring it on. This combative book is a rarity, particularly as protective agencies are being hobbled.

Horrifyingly, Michaels shows the same playbook in numerous other such (what should be) criminal cases, including opioids, Teflon, alcohol, sugary drinks, Volkswagen’s diesel fraud and even concussions in American football. So everything in the book is current and familiar. He sees his job as stopping industry from killing everyone in the quest for vast profit, and theirs is to stop him at all costs, or at least put it off until they can retire wealthy.

One of Michaels’ greatest achievements was nailing down regulations for silica (from sand), a battle that went on for two decades. The delaying tactics included a memorable incident when an industry lawyer challenged a government witness to prove that silica actually caused silicosis, claiming no such connection was ever demonstrated. As Michaels calmly points out, the very definition of silicosis is lung disease caused by silica, hence the name. This is the kind of thing industry routinely resorts to as it flails in any and all directions. In the meantime, miners, construction workers and neighbors are sentenced to death.

He calls for more respect for government agencies, which are packed with dedicated scientists who gave up lucrative careers to research and promote truth, safety, and security for everyone. He says they should be allowed to ban not just individual chemical compounds, but the whole range. He says industry, banned from using one specific chemical compound, simplify reformulates it with the same active ingredient, and the whole dance starts over while innocents die. Science itself is totally disrespected as can be seen daily in the current administration, and one of the political parties actively pursues that line of prejudice. The result is ineffective government, which the administration uses to show regulation is bad.

So is it true that exercise counts more than the sugar you drink? Or that alcohol in moderation is actually good for you? Or that nine out of 10 smokers don’t develop cancer from tobacco (as VP Mike Pence declares), so people should have the freedom to smoke around others? Should you really distrust all the scientists who have concluded that climate change is real and instead believe the senators and governors of backward states? Or the corporate lobbyists over the career government researchers who claim that CO2 is not a pollutant? If you are confused because a flurry of studies pops up in the news saying something is actually beneficial and that all the other studies are wrong, this is the book for you. Because not knowing can be fatal.

David Wineberg… (mehr)

Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health
David Michaels, 2008

This heavily documented but readable book discusses the ways in which industry fights against health, safety, and environmental regulations. I would like to encourage more people to read this, especially those involved in public policy, critical thinking, science, health, education, and politics.

Even if you don’t read the whole thing, it might be worth reading one or two chapters (pick a topic that looks interesting to you!) and the last chapter (or last 2 chapters), which is full of suggestions for further action. The more people who are thinking and talking about this topic, the better.

Some of the techniques used by industries:

1. Manufacturing Doubt: Real science works on the preponderance of the evidence. In the interests of science it is considered most ethical to limit something that appears to have bad health effects, even if the exact mechanism is not yet understood. Safety and health first! Industry has been claiming the standard should be absolute certainty, which is not possible.

2. Playing with Statistics: Doing studies with the goal in mind is not scientifically ethical. A properly done study asks a question and then does the work to figure out the answer to the question. Picking and choosing data that will give a desired result, watering down the data, using methods that are not scientifically accepted – these are all improper techniques that are used.

3. Playing the Regulatory System:
*Many of the federal regulatory associations are required to evaluate any new information that has been submitted to them. Industry scientists are good at making lots of studies (see #2) that bog down the system. In addition, industries now have the right to re-analyze federal data, but they are allowed to hide their own data.
* People from industries are frequently brought into the committees and regulatory agencies meant to regulate those industries. Regardless of claims otherwise, if you want impartial people it is possible to find good scientists and train them up/make it their job to understand what they need to.
* The rules of the regulatory system have been changed/hampered.
* Judges can now be asked to evaluate in advance if scientific evidence will be allowed in a trial, despite the fact that judges are not scientists.
After a disaster (like our recent mining and oil disasters), citizens ask why someone wasn’t watching; why someone wasn’t protecting us. And polls have shown that Americans want their government to be taking care of these things. But the EPA and OSHA are weakened by rules that industry (and some administrations) have set up in the background, so they don’t work as well.

4. Delay: Delaying regulation is a priority, even if it means more people get sick, because it means more seasons of sales and production. I was surprised and disturbed by both the length of some of the cases (sometimes taking decades to get resolved, with many people suffering the consequences) and the recentness of other cases (because I like to think we are better than that.)

5. Manufacturing “Independent” Views: Industries create dummy associations to promote their view, and fund them in the background. They develop “captured” journals that are willing to publish the long and misleading articles that the industry wants to publish. (Scientists usually are pressured to keep their articles short, but long articles are more impressive to people – like juries – who may not understand the science). This last is especially disturbing to me when I think of science students using these articles for reference. How can you recognize what is good, peer-reviewed work, and what is supported by groups that have been designed to support each other?

10. I don’t want to be one of those people who comes across as crazy, disaffected, anti-establishment, paranoid, etc. But I do want our government to act in such a way that I can believe that what I eat, breathe, and purchase will most likely NOT be harming me or the people who make it or dispose of it. The good news is that many of the stories in here ended up being successes for public health. But we need people who are working as hard as industries, with all their money and advertising and “scientists” and lawyers behind them, are working, because they are going to keep at it, and we the people should be the ones calling the shots.… (mehr)

I am with Michaels in his fight to regulate toxic and hazardous substances, and I am angry (but not surprised) at the cynical, reckless industrial behaviour that he documents so thoroughly in his book.

But "Doubt is Their Product" has two large problems, as a book: first, it often gets lost in the details and the acronyms, failing to abstract to a larger picture of the issues with industry-backed science until the last chapters. The issue of open science, in particular, is quite hairy and Michaels doesn't explore it as much as it deserves. Second, the book is almost exclusively concerned with United States policy, which might be fine for an American reader but frustratingly foreign to the rest of the world.

However, all things considered, if you believe that privately-funded science is superior in any way to publicly-funded science, this is a most-read.… (mehr)

This book tells the life stories of various toxic substances and harmful products, from tobacco to beryllium, and how industry tried to divert the science that said the substance was harmful. It's a story not only of corporate guilt and greed, but also of the weakness of our governmental institutions charged with the job of keeping us safe.

From our governmental agencies, to the courts handcuffed by the "Daubert" case, to prestigious scientific journals fooled by phoney corporate studies, to politicized scientific panels and boards, it's plainly a long sad story. Some of these companies using these toxics (or dangerous products) knew for years that they were harming their workers or the public but covered it up, tried to "undo" the science by "manufacturing uncertainty," and denied any wrongdoing. In the end you now have some of these companies calling for tort reform to insulate themselves even further from the possibility of being made responsible, a situation the author calls, "profoundly cynical and profoundly dangerous."

At the end of the book are seventy pages of notes, carefully documenting the details in the book.

Together with, How Much Risk?: a Guide to Understanding Environmental Health Hazards, by Inge and Martin Goldstein, the reader will be armed with a much greater understanding of the toxics issue and the scientific challenges underlying it.

Another good feature of Doubt Is Their Product is that it contains a list of four reforms for the court system and a list of twelve suggestions for the regulatory system. What's truly tragic is to realize how unlikely it is, in the present climate, that any of these suggestions will be enacted into law.

David Michaels worked in the Clinton administration as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety, and Health and is an epidemiologist with the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services.… (mehr)