1
Introduction
at halftime of the National Football League’s 2015 AFC championship game, the New England Patriots led the Indianapolis Colts 17–7. The game’s stakes were high: the winner would advance to the Super Bowl. When the players returned to the field for the second half, the Patriots proceeded to score touchdowns on their first four possessions, blow the game open, and coast to a 45–7 victory.
Within days, however, a strange rumor explaining the Patriots’ second-half explosion spread among fans, trollers, and news media. As the rumor went, someone in the Patriots locker room tampered with the footballs during halftime, then sneaked them into the game—perhaps at the direction of the team’s famed quarterback Tom Brady, who reportedly prefers underinflated footballs. Was this how he was able to work his second-half magic against the unwitting Colts? The national intrigue that followed was immediately and predictably labeled “Deflategate.” Media scrutiny centered on the sport’s most famous player, and required a vigorous response in order for the league to show it was committed to ensuring fair play.
The competitive context in this story was more complicated than an investigation of alleged cheating. Led by Brady, perhaps the best active quarterback (and, at age 38 at the time, also the oldest), the New England Patriots had dominated pro football over the previous 13 years, winning three Super Bowls and losing two others. In an era of parity in the league, this success was unprecedented, affording the Patriots a large and devoted fan base—as well as utter contempt from fans of other teams. The Deflategate allegations fit a pattern of competitive misbehavior that, fairly or not, had followed the Patriots for years; in 2007, the team was publicly judged guilty of cheating after an episode in which they videotaped opposing teams’ play-calling signals. This prompted many owners of other teams, as well as some of the league’s fans, to believe that at least some of their rival’s remarkable sustained success was unearned. Now it seemed the Patriots were doctoring footballs, too.
According to most reports, there was no love lost between Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the other 31 team owners, who together pressured league commissioner Roger Goodell to use the deflated footballs as justification to punish the storied franchise. But Goodell couldn’t do this without sufficient proof that Brady and, presumably, a confederate in the locker room, had deflated the balls. Toward that end, Goodell did what many corporate leaders have done for decades when they desperately need “science” to be on their side: he turned to the professionals who produce reports that predictably reach conclusions favorable to their clients.
This book is not about Deflategate. None of the episodes and issues I’ll discuss here are as trivial as the allegation that a celebrated quarterback may have cheated in a big football game. The subjects here are deadly serious (including a different NFL story: brain injuries). The knee-jerk behavior demonstrated by the NFL in Deflategate is pertinent only because it’s a notorious episode that vividly demonstrates the reach of an instinctive, systemic corporate behavior, one that flies mostly under the media’s and the public’s radar.
Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop making this stuff.” In fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. The instinct is to take the low road: deny the allegations, defend the product at all costs, and attack attack attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, corporate leaders and anti-regulation ideologues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public. They’ll never say they care less about our water and air than environmentalists do. But their actions belie their rhetoric. Decision-makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals a certain dissonance creeps in: profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision.
Of course, decisions at the highest level are also not black-and-white or remotely simple. They’re dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation, perhaps combined with loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, the companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.
Most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to demonstrate mercenary behaviors. It’s in the corporations’ DNA. We don’t expect mercenary scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This book is about those science-for-sale specialists and the “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want. It’s a version of the old garment center joke: “Turn on the blue light, the man wants a blue suit!”
There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field. In the example of the NFL and Deflategate, Commissioner Goodell hired Exponent, one of the nation’s best-known and most successful product defense firms. These operations have on their payrolls (or can bring in on a moment’s notice) toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.
I describe this corporate strategy as “manufacturing doubt,” or “manufacturing uncertainty.” My objective is to identify, characterize, and illuminate this strategy so readers can see exactly what these mercenary scientists and the firms that hire them are doing. In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there’s too much doubt about the evidence, not enough proof of harm, not enough proof of enough harm.
It is public relations disguised as science. The companies’ PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters, who are mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair-minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were injured by the product in question. The corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as “sound science,” but actually they just sound like science. Such bought-and-paid-for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interests is vilified. There’s a word for that: Orwellian.
Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine-tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry, there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment; debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy. In earlier decades, we have seen this play out with tobacco, secondhand smoke, asbestos, industrial pollution, and a host of chemicals and products. These industries’ strategy of denial is alive and well today. Nor is this practice of hiring experts and hiding data about harms limited to health concerns and the environment. Beyond toxic chemicals, we see it with toxic information as well. (Consider the corporate misbehaviors of Facebook, which serve as a pertinent sidebar to my story.)
I am not asserting that the conclusions of every study or report produced by product defense experts are necessarily wrong; it certainly is legitimate for scientists to work to prove one hypothesis in the cause of disproving another. One means by which science moves toward the real truth is by challenging and disproving supposed truth and received wisdom. Maybe there are two sides to every story—but maybe not two valid sides, and definitely not when one has been purchased at a high price, and produced by firms whose financial success rests on delivering the studies and reports that support whatever conclusion their corporate clients need.
The strategy of manufacturing doubt has worked wonders as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. In the long run, product defense campaigns rarely hold up; some don’t pass the laugh test to begin with. But the main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, thereby allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product. Doubt can delay or obstruct public health or environmental protections, or just convince some jurors that the science isn’t strong enough to label a product as responsible for terrible illnesses.
Eventually, as the serious scientific studies get stronger and more definitive, and as the corporate studies are revealed as unconvincing or simply wrong (then generally forgotten, with the authors paying no penalty for their prevarications), the manufacturers give up and acknowledge the harm done by their products. Then they submit to stronger regulation, sometimes even costing themselves more money than they would have paid in the first place. But they can do the math: they have also been making a lot of money for all those years. Their wealth compounds. And as for the people who have been sickened or worse in the interim? Or the despoiled environment? Well, those are unfortunate. Sorry.
And what happens to the product defense firms? There’s always another opportunity to manipulate the vulnerabilities at the intersection of science and money. In Deflategate, Exponent’s official report enabled the NFL’s attorneys to assert, four months after the game in question was played, that experts found “no set of credible environmental or physical factors” that could completely account for the change in pressure of the Patriots’ footballs. Combined with other circumstantial evidence, “it was more probable than not” that the balls were intentionally deflated. To be fair, the NFL also relied on texts and other evidence suggesting that the game balls may, in fact, have been deflated.1 But Exponent had done its job, providing the conclusion that was useful to the NFL to build the case for the quarterback’s guilt. Goodell suspended Brady for four games in the ensuing 2015 season, fined the Patriots $1 million, and stripped the team of its next first-round draft pick. One can imagine the legal wrangling that followed the suspension: the case ended up in federal court, and the legalities spilled into the new season starting that fall. Brady’s suspension was therefore held in abeyance, he played the entire 16-game season and playoffs, and the Patriots were defeated in the AFC Championship game. He served the four-game suspension in 2016. His team won three of the four games in his absence and eventually, with Brady back at the helm, the Super Bowl yet again. (They returned to the Super Bowl in 2019 and won, for a total of six wins and three losses—nine total appearances—in 17 years, which is beyond ridiculous.)
Exponent’s report to the owners ended up being an embarrassment to the NFL. John Leonard, a roboticist and mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the early skeptics about Exponent’s work and conducted a series of analyses that demonstrated that the original calculations were incorrect and that “no nefarious deflation actually occurred.”2 Leonard’s very compelling lecture on YouTube has been viewed more than 300,000 times.3 Since he lives and works in Massachusetts, Leonard could be suspected of bias, but he turns out to be a turncoat in this regard: he roots for the Philadelphia Eagles. Nor is he alone in his criticisms of the Exponent report. Faculty at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, and other academic centers have all pointed out errors in the report.4 So this was not the product defense industry’s finest hour—just an indicative one, and one that received more national attention than most.
Early in my career, I practiced and taught epidemiology, which is the study of the health of populations. I specifically studied the links between disease and workplace exposures, including substances like asbestos, lead, and other chemicals. In 2001, I decided to shift the focus of my research to public policy and the application of the findings of epidemiology to disease prevention. Since then I have written extensively about public health harms and environmental degradations perpetrated by various industries and defended with boilerplate “uncertainty” campaigns. This career-within-the-career was launched—maybe I should say inspired—by the years I served under President Bill Clinton as assistant secretary for environment, safety, and health, at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The agency’s name suggests engagement with issues involving oil and electricity generation (reportedly the initial understanding of President Donald Trump’s DOE secretary, former Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry), but those are actually minor considerations for this agency. Its primary activities are the production of nuclear weapons and cleaning up the messes resulting from their production. I was, in effect, the chief safety officer for this weapons program. The job there was a particularly challenging one: to protect the workers, community residents, and environment in and around the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. These facilities had harbored—and in some cases still do harbor—huge amounts of the toxic chemicals required to make the plutonium and highly enriched uranium at the core of nuclear weapons. Manufacturing and testing these weapons almost necessarily exposed thousands of workers to chemicals and radiation and created some of the most dangerously polluted locations in the country.
This was a very exciting period to be at the Department of Energy. The United States and its allies had won the Cold War, and it was time to reassess the nation’s need for a large nuclear weapons arsenal. It was also time to revisit the DOE’s unstated policy to pretend that these exposures never made workers sick—“Deny and Defend” was the sardonic label used around headquarters, if not in the paperwork. Workers at sites all around the country believed that their exposures had made them sick, and their government did nothing to help them. I visited with many of these workers and saw that, in many cases, they were right. Clearly, those with chronic beryllium disease had developed this disabling condition in machining the beryllium (a toxic metal) used to help maximize the power of an atomic explosion. For other workers, it was less clear that workplace exposures were responsible for their conditions, but none of them trusted DOE to honestly adjudicate their claims. And they had good reason. Apparently, the agency’s institutional leaders had feared that simply acknowledging that workers were being overexposed to radiation or toxic chemicals would have damaged the nation’s ability to make the weapons needed to first win World War II, then the Cold War.
Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson asked me to find a solution to this unfair catch-22; our new initiative resulted in President Clinton’s apology to these workers. More important, legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president set up a workers’ compensation program that to date has awarded more than $16 billion to workers and the families of workers who became sick following exposure in these weapons facilities. (The saga is a lengthy chapter, “Making Peace with the Past,” in my previous book, Doubt Is Their Product.)
Of course, the weapons program did not end with the Cold War, and controlling worker exposures and limiting pollution going forward would not be easy. Many of the facilities were old and technologically outmoded. Under my leadership, we issued a series of new safety and health regulations. Several of them improved nuclear safety in the weapons industry; the most important was a strengthened beryllium standard, which DOE staff, with the help of academic experts, had been working on for several years. Then it was full steam ahead, and as we developed and then finalized the workplace beryllium exposure regulation, I witnessed firsthand exactly how corporations that make dangerous products can manufacture uncertainty to slow down the regulatory process.
Even though the strengthened DOE rule governing beryllium would apply only to government facilities, the beryllium industry opposed any change at all. Why? Because a new DOE standard, especially one developed with great care and caution, would increase the likelihood that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would follow with new rules that reduced exposures at the private-sector facilities under that agency’s jurisdiction. (There are many such facilities, because beryllium is a remarkable metal—lighter than aluminum yet stronger than steel—and its alloys and compounds exhibit all kinds of unusual characteristics, making it valuable in all kinds of industrial applications.)
The beryllium industry engaged a product defense firm (Exponent, again) to convince the DOE that there was too much uncertainty to move forward.5 It was clear to me that they were applying the model perfected by the tobacco industry: manufacture uncertainty about the science to avoid having to reduce exposure or compensate victims. That was a long, hard-fought battle—truly scientific and legal trench warfare—but in the end we substantially won.
With the election of President George W. Bush, I left the federal government and returned to academia. Now knowing all too well what tactics to look for, I saw that the beryllium industry’s efforts were not unique; tobacco’s model was alive and well. In fact, many of the same scientists who had worked for the cigarette makers were now plying their product defense trade on behalf of asbestos, benzene, chromium, and a host of other toxic chemicals. And the new Bush administration was using the arguments provided by these mercenary scientists to slow down implementation of public health and environmental protections.
As I uncovered more and more about these efforts, I published several articles and commentaries in Science and other academic journals, identifying the problem and suggesting policy solutions. I titled my piece in Scientific American “Doubt Is Their Product,” a phrase from the memo of the tobacco industry executive who candidly described that industry’s efforts to refute the studies that demonstrated the deadly effects of cigarette smoking. “Doubt is our product,” he wrote, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”6 The piece in Scientific American led me to write the book of the same title, with the subtitle “How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.” That evolved into a massive research effort. There was no end to the evidence left behind by beleaguered industries: 85 pages of footnotes; 1,100 references.
The book was well received in the scientific community, but it clearly hit some nerves in the corporate world. I was asked by the Defense Research Institute, the attorneys who defend corporations and their uncertainty campaigns, to debate Dennis Paustenbach, one of the product defense scientists whose work I pilloried in the book. I accepted the challenge. If I was willing to say something on paper, I should be willing to say it in public, including in front of an audience of a few hundred attorneys who represent some of the nation’s leading polluters (a roster that includes some of the country’s largest and most powerful corporations). The debate would have been the opportune moment for Paustenbach to identify the many mistakes I had made in Doubt Is Their Product. It must have been frustrating for him—and the audience—that he could not identify a single one.7 To this day, no one has. I say that not to be self-aggrandizing, but to convey that there is a factual bottom to every issue, and that’s what Doubt Is Their Product conveyed—and what this book conveys, too. In both, some of the stories of industry’s malfeasance are so flagrant some readers may think “Oh, come on, this can’t possibly be true.” Alas, every story is true.
After I left the Department of Energy, I was happy in the private sector, teaching and writing at George Washington University. I had not planned to go back into government service until President Barack Obama asked me to take the reins at OSHA. I could not refuse. This position—technically, assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—is the single most important position in the area of worker safety and health in the nation, and the one from which I could make the greatest contribution to public health.
The average tenure for an OSHA administrator is about two years; before me, no chief had served for even four. (Too often, political appointees to federal regulatory agencies hold the office for two or three years, time enough to add the position to their résumé, gain name recognition for speaking and consulting gigs later on, then head for the revolving door—and a far bigger salary—in the private sector. This is especially true of attorneys, who use both their knowledge of an agency’s internal procedures and the contacts they have made to switch sides and now cynically fight the agency’s attempts to protect the public’s health and safety.) I stayed at OSHA for more than seven years—until Donald Trump was inaugurated. I’m often asked how I made it so long in such a difficult job. Well, my situation was different. First, I loved the job, and, also, I had tenure at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. Most academics are granted a two-year leave of absence by their universities to take a government post, after which they must return to teaching or give up tenure. GW administrators were very generous to me, extending my initial two-year leave of absence year after year after year. The eventual seven-plus years is virtually unheard of in academia.
Running OSHA was a dream job for me, one that my entire career helped me prepare for. Working for President Obama was a great honor. I was part of a remarkable, dedicated team of colleagues across the government, committed to working closely together to improve the lives and well-being of the nation. As senior administration leadership, we held ourselves to the highest standards for integrity and commitment to the mission of our agencies, and there were very few cases where our expectations were not met. OSHA was filled with highly competent professionals who shared that dedication to protecting the safety and health of the nation’s workers.
When I returned to GW to teach epidemiology and environmental health policy, I planned to focus my research on the relationship of workplace safety and health management and operational excellence. In manufacturing, no production system is designed to injure workers. If they are being injured nevertheless, something is awry with the design and/or management. I had seen plenty of examples of firms whose executives told me that their safety programs made them better, more successful companies. Because they managed for safety, their operations ran more smoothly, there was less wastage of labor or materials, and their employees had higher morale and lower turnover, meaning less money was spent on recruiting and training new employees. Safety management made them more productive and therefore more profitable.8 Take Hasbro, one of the largest toy and board game manufacturers in the world. When I was at OSHA, Hasbro had only one manufacturing plant remaining in the United States. All other production had been shifted to countries in Asia with lower labor costs. That one remaining plant was a unionized operation in Massachusetts, a high-cost state. But a Hasbro executive explained to me that the OSHA voluntary safety program in which that facility was enrolled made the plant so productive, and therefore so profitable, there was no reason to move it overseas. In fact, Hasbro has recently returned Play-Doh production from Turkey and China to Massachusetts.9
But the inroads of progress in protecting the science underpinning our public health and environmental protections have not been sustained. Once again, tobacco’s uncertainty campaign dating from the 1950s is serving as the template for corporate behavior in 2020. Dark money rules. Corporations or rich individuals pour money into organizations set up as “educational” nonprofits, whose objective is to sow confusion and uncertainty on climate change, toxic chemicals, or the health effects of soda or alcoholic beverages. There is no way to easily find out the hidden funders of some of these groups. Secrets abound, and much of what we’ve learned comes from either lawsuits or, occasionally, careless mistakes in which donors are identified by accident.
Manufactured doubt is everywhere, defending dangerous products in the food we eat, the beverages we drink, and the air we breathe. The direct impact is thousands of people needlessly sickened. There is no question that if these “uncertainty” campaigns had not been waged, we’d have a far healthier population and a cleaner environment. Following the U.S. election of Donald Trump, the fundamentals of evidence-based policymaking came under unprecedented attack. Just as unwelcome news automatically became fake news, unwelcome science became fake science. Incredibly, the federal government elevated studies conjured by product defense specialists over the studies done by independent, academic scientists. Worse, perhaps, the scientists whose careers have been defined by their science-for-sale studies exonerating toxic chemicals were brought inside, running or advising the very agencies that regulate those chemicals.
All this backsliding inspired me to write this book. It is not a memoir of my tenure at OSHA, but the perspective I acquired in that office did impact my thinking about science and its role in policymaking and regulation. The scientific enterprise is at a crossroads, I believe. We as a society are at a crossroads. We need to understand what is still going on—now more than ever, really—and what the consequences have already been for public health. This is an opportune moment—the necessary moment—to again look hard at how science can be used to protect our health and planetary well-being—but also misused to damage them. I’ll focus in detail on several of the leading public health concerns that have been targeted by product defense campaigns. Two of my topics—the opioid epidemic and revelations about the long-term impact of head trauma on professional football players (an NFL story a lot more important than Deflategate)—have jolted the national psyche. Others—sugar, alcohol, toxic chemicals, air and water pollution, and of course climate change—directly impact the health of millions of people in the United States and billions around the globe. Climate change, a particular target of President Donald Trump and his administration, will likely end up trumping all of the others in global importance. And I have no choice but to write bluntly about the impact of the Trump administration on the interface between public policy and lobbying and science, with evidence-based policymaking on the run, alternative facts all the rage. To support the assertions I make in this book, every primary source I reference is on the web, with many of the previously unavailable documents now posted on the “Triumph of Doubt” Special Collection at the Toxic Docs website (toxicdocs.org) operated by Columbia University and the City University of New York.
Other topics could have been discussed in this book. There are analyses to be done, for example, of the corporate efforts to manufacture uncertainty around the causes of earthquakes in Oklahoma (“dewatering”—pumping into the ground water left over from oil drilling); or the dangers of mass-feeding antibiotics to bulk up the animals confined in concentrated feeding operations (and therefore developing antibiotic resistant superbugs); or pesticides, flame retardants, artificial flavors, sterilants, or dozens of other substances that cause untold havoc on the human body. For now, I hope that shining a light on these few instances of harmful, misleading industry behavior will increase awareness, both of what manufactured doubt looks like and where it is leveraged against the public good.