Now that we have
maybe identified somebody who killed, what, 37 people?, let's start identifying individuals responsible for
millions of more horrendous deaths, often drawn out over months of suffering, and maybe try to stop them.
The guys who first put lead in gasoline are long dead already. There were people who fought getting it out of the gasoline, and they are mostly dead, by now, too. Likewise, leaded paint. That was banned in 1978. Thousands of people are still being killed by paint exposure, though, many indirectly by violent tendencies induced by lead paint exposure, which people still experience, by the millions, every day.
Lots of people fought tooth and nail to keep people in doubt about tobacco smoke causing lung cancer. They are mostly dead. The top academic in statistics was one of those, and was personally responsible for decades of denial that observational study could determine causation, fetishizing random-controlled trials, RCTs. (RCTs are great, but anybody who insists that only RCTs can demonstrate causation is a fetishist.) He's dead too, but his legacy lives on, still killing people en mass.
The people who started hydrogenating vegetable oils, starting with waste cottonseed oil, are long dead. But trans fats, produced by hydrogenation, were only (technically) banned from the US diet in 2017. That was an outcome of Fred Kummerow's entire career: he knew in the '50s that trans fats were poison, and worked for decades to get them banned. He died in 2016. I say "technically" because certain corporations have special dispensation to continue poisoning people. Maybe, catch them? Maybe, catch whoever fought the 2017 ban, who had poisoned people for many decades before, and sought to continue? They are mostly still alive.
The biggest public health problem in the US today, killing way more than COVID-19, comes from (being precise!) consumption of fructose without adequate accompanying fiber. The sodas, Coke/Pepsi the biggest, but also juice, apple, orange, cranberry, Red Bull, Monster, are worst. But sugar, which is half fructose, is added to practically everything nowadays, not just breakfast cereal. Almost the whole food industry is devoted to stripping out fiber and selling the rest; when "the rest" has, or gets added, sugar, it becomes slow poison. (Robert Lustig videos on Youtube are a great way to start learning about this. He has books out, too. Lustig is an endocrinologist, the smartest kind of medical doctor.)
One of the reasons sugar is added to everything is that we were told for decades that saturated fat was bad for us. (Another is that sugar production is massively subsidized, so is the cheapest ingredient.) All the stuff blamed on sat fat turns out to be caused, instead, by the trans fats and sugar. The saturated fat is not only totally harmless, it is important for brain function, so its loss compounds the problem.
Thus, the people taking fiber out of and putting sugar into everything are the biggest current mass killers. Likewise, everybody maintaining sugar production subsidies. Stringing them up may be an over-reaction. Anyway stopping them seems like a good idea. At least, require fructose-content and fructose vs. fiber labeling? Think about them next time the news is full of somebody killing a dozen people. Is a dozen bad, but millions A-OK?