Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame. The problem is: - Humans invent something useful and cool. - Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity a…
The problem is the point between 2 and 3: - Humans who discovered the toxicity lie, bribe, bully, and cheat to stop anyone else from finding out. The solution is delayed by decades and deaths go through the roof.
But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.
Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.
Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.
I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.