Tom Dwyer Automotive is a proud sponsor of the Illahee Lecture Series, an ongoing lecture series that you’re long overdue to check out. Their speaker in April was Wendell Potter, a health insurance PR executive who quit the industry and is explaining how the industry works behind the scenes to create doubt and fear about any change to the existing health care system. In his lecture, Potter (also the 
subject of our News To Make You Furious column this month) described a reality that is worse than the conspiracy theorists can imagine, and it’s hard to believe it’s not some sort of exaggeration. Although his comments were restricted to the insurance industry, coordinated plans have been in place for years in many industries to not only shape public opinion, but to evade, distort, and blind it. To back up Mr. Potter’s assertions, our Book Spotlight this month shows you how this campaign is carried on in other industries, and how to fight back.
Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health
by David Michaels
Publisher Comments:
“Doubt is our product,” a cigarette executive once observed, “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.”
In this eye-opening expose, David Michaels reveals how the tobacco industry’s duplicitous tactics spawned a multimillion dollar industry that is dismantling public health safeguards. Product defense consultants, he argues, have increasingly skewed the scientific literature, manufactured and magnified scientific uncertainty, and influenced policy decisions to the advantage of polluters and the manufacturers of dangerous products. To keep the public confused about the hazards posed by global warming, second-hand smoke, asbestos, lead, plastics, and many other toxic materials, industry executives have hired unscrupulous scientists and lobbyists to dispute scientific evidence about health risks. In doing so, they have not only delayed action on specific hazards, but they have constructed barriers to make it harder for lawmakers, government agencies, and courts to respond to future threats. The Orwellian strategy of dismissing research conducted by the scientific community as “junk science” and elevating science conducted by product defense specialists to “sound science” status also creates confusion about the very nature of scientific inquiry and undermines the public’s confidence in science’s ability to address public health and environmental concerns. Such reckless practices have long existed, but Michaels argues that the Bush administration deepened the dysfunction by virtually handing over regulatory agencies to the very corporate powers whose products and behavior they are charged with overseeing.
In Doubt Is Their Product Michaels proves, beyond a doubt, that our regulatory system has been broken. He offers concrete, workable suggestions for how it can be restored by taking the politics out of science and ensuring that concern for public safety, rather than private profits, guides our regulatory policy.
Named one of the best Sci-Tech books of 2008 by Library Journal!
About the Author
David Michaels is a scientist and former government regulator. During the Clinton Administration, he served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health. He was the architect of the historic initiative to compensate nuclear weapons workers who developed cancer and lung disease. He is currently Research Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and Professor, Albert Einstein School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He lives in Bethesda, MD.
