Scranton (p. 32), quotes the beginning of a paragraph where we place in context industry’s attempt to make itself appear as if it were working “openly and cooperatively” with government. He spends almost two pages citing this statement to argue that we are only involved in “advocacy and oversimplification.” He criticizes our first sentence: “Given that industry documents remained secret, there was no way to understand that the industry had acted to hide from the government information about vinyl as a carcinogen.” Again, in order to excuse industry actions he reverts to the argument that nothing could really be proven about the carcinogenic nature of vinyl chloride monomer. As discussed earlier, he hides behind the inexactness of science, refusing to acknowledge that the industry understood the import of Maltoni’s information and kept that information from the government, the workforce and the public. He criticizes our second sentence: “As a result, the companies could still pass themselves off as working openly and cooperatively with the government.” He argues, disingenuously, that we “diminish the firms’ open and cooperative working relationship with the government.” He may see the hiding of information and the planning of deception as a sign of openness and cooperation, but we do not. He considers our third sentence: “It would take decades for researchers and lawyers to shed light on industry documents and to learn of the cover-ups, denials and lies.”(D&D, p.198). Scranton says we have not presented the historical evidence to support this. We believe any reasonable reader will, if they consult our book, our timeline, the industry documents and this discussion, find ample historical evidence to support our claims.
To Scranton, this is “advocacy and oversimplification.” But to Dr. Anthony Robbins, who was the Director of NIOSH from 1978 through 1981, our discussion provides evidence of industry activities that were not known to those intimately involved in the issue of vinyl chloride and hardly “advocacy and oversimplification.” In a very positive review of our book in the Journal of Public Health Policy Robbins related that while at NIOSH, “I needed to be on top of the vinyl chloride issues. Until I read Deceit and Denial I certainly believed that I had been an insider, had been well-informed about what had happened in the struggle to regulate vinyl chloride. How little I knew! How little I understood about industry efforts to manipulate the debate and influence the regulatory outcomes. For these classic cases, lead and vinyl chloride, this book tells much more than I knew, perhaps close to the whole story.” [31]
This is one of the sillier accusations aimed at discrediting our book. Virtually all the reviews of Deceit and Denial comment on the superiority of the research. See, for example, the Reviews in American History (in which the book is praised as “virtually flawless”); the American Historical Review (in which the reviewer finds that our “access to private industry sources, which have long escaped the scrutiny of historians, provides a rich if very disturbing picture of internal politics and decision making at the corporate level”); reviews in Science, Business History Review, JAMA, The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, and numerous other journals which praise the research in this book. Deceit and Denial has over 82 pages of endnotes for 306 pages of text. The two chapters critiqued by Scranton contain over 300 endnotes, many with multiple references.
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