Capitalism as usual: Profit above truth, human health and the environment

A long, detailed ProPublica article reports about a common occurrence among huge corporations, namely enforced secrecy to defend profits at the expense of the public interest:

How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals 

She Found in Human Blood Were Safe

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.

Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS — short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid — often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood.

Kris Hanson

Long story short, Hansen repeated her results, then applied a more accurate measurement method and got the same results over and over. Everyone had PFOS in their blood. Hanson told her boss Johnson about the finding and his response was “this changes everything.” Johnson then walked into his office, closed the door and said nothing else the rest of the day. Later that same day, Johnson’s boss Dale Bacon came to Hanson and told her her results were wrong. Hanson then got more blood from more sources and tested them. All had PFOS contamination. While Hanson was doing her repeat testing, Johnson announced that he would be taking early retirement. He packed up his office and left.

The most reliable way to gauge the safety of chemicals is to study them over time, in animals and, if possible, humans. ProPublica reported that Hansen didn’t know that 3M scientists had already conducted animal studies in the 1970s and found evidence of PFOS toxicity in rats. A 1979 3M internal report in 1979 concluded that PFOS was “certainly more toxic than anticipated.” Explicit warnings about PFOS toxicity from an outside expert were omitted from internal company documents.

One 3M manager told Hanson that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned everything, repeated the experiments and got the same results. 3M was looking for ways to discredit Hanson and her data. ProPublica described the extremes to which 3M as going to kill the results:

Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was 28 and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.  

After Hansen started her PFOS research, her relationships with some colleagues seemed to deteriorate. One afternoon in 1998, a trim 3M epidemiologist named Geary Olsen arrived with several vials of blood and asked her to test them. The next morning, she read the results to him and several colleagues — positive for PFOS. As Hansen remembers it, Olsen looked triumphant. “Those samples came from my horse,” he said — and his horse certainly wasn’t eating at McDonald’s or trotting on Scotchgarded carpets. Hansen felt that he was trying to humiliate her. (Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.) What Hansen wanted to know was how PFOS was making its way into animals.  

Hansen’s team found it in Swedish blood samples from 1957 and 1971. After that, her lab analyzed blood that had been collected before 3M created PFOS. It tested negative. Apparently, fluorochemicals had entered human blood after the company started selling products that contained them. They had leached out of 3M’s sprays, coatings and factories — and into all of us.  

Even as Hansen was being sidelined, the results of her research were quietly making their way into the files of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since the ’70s, federal law has required that companies tell the EPA about any evidence indicating that a company’s products present “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” In May 1998, 3M officials notified the agency, without informing Hansen, that the company had measured PFOS in blood samples from around the U.S. — a clear reference to Hansen’s work. It did not mention its animal research from the ’70s, and it said that the chemical caused “no adverse effects” at the levels the company had measured in its workers. A year later, 3M sent the EPA another letter, again without telling Hansen. This time, it informed the agency about the 14 other fluorochemicals, several of them made by 3M, that Hansen’s team had detected in human blood. The company reiterated that it did not believe that its products presented a substantial risk to human health.  

In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025 — a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than 16,000 of its products still contained PFAS. Direct sales of the chemicals were generating $1.3 billion annually. 3M’s regulatory filings also allow for the possibility that a full phaseout won’t happen — for example, if 3M fails to find substitutes. “We are continuing to make progress on our announcement to exit PFAS manufacturing,” 3M’s spokesperson told me [ProPublica reporter Sharon Lerner]. The company and its scientists have not admitted wrong­doing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.

This reporting personally resonates quite a lot. A company I worked for in the 1980s had two different well-known consumer products tested for one form of toxicity, one each from two major corporations. One was mildly toxic but a common food ingredient and the other was horrendously toxic. After receiving their toxicity reports, lawyers for the two corporations wrote a letter to our CEO, (i) reminding him of the secrecy agreement the testing was done under, and (ii) threatening to ruin him and the company if the toxicity data was ever leaked to the public. 

The foot-dragging, downplaying bad data and denying responsibility in pursuit of profit is standard corporate tactics. That is the rule, not the exception. Exxon-Mobil and oil companies do it about global warming. Cigarette companies still do it about lung cancer. All or nearly all big corporations do it about whatever they make money from doing. Profit is always privatized and trickled up to the elites, while harm and damage to humans and the environment are socialized and offloaded from corporate responsibility as much as possible. And, much is possible with America’s corrupt pay-to-play, two-party political system.  

From this story, one can easily see why the authoritarian radical right Republican Party Project 2025 plans to get rid of the EPA and environmental protection regulations. 1970s federal law had required that companies tell the EPA about any evidence indicating that a company’s products present “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” By getting rid of laws like that, corporations can legally keep their dirty laundry hidden. That is how plutocracy works. That is the core morality of capitalism.

I do not know if the toxicity data my old company generated was ever reported to the EPA. Given the moral mindset of capitalism, that data may have never been reported.