Your comment also reminds me of the late 80s and early 90s when tobacco companies pumped massive amounts of cash into cancer research to muddy the water around the harms being caused by their products.
There were conditions like emphysema that were basically unheard of in non-smokers (or people who worked in certain occupations that involved a lot of combustion byproducts) and common in smokers.
The correlations here (at the levels most of us are exposed to) are incredibly weak. Don’t take my word for them, look them up.
This is more like the link between aspartame and cancer. There’s no smoking gun, no high correlations. If you look up the symptoms “linked” to it, there are hundreds at least.
Not all correlations are equal.
But, I install R/O filters in my house because I am not certain it is not harmful and why take the chance? I’m just not certain it is harmful and I would need to be to support jailing people or banning the chemicals immediately and entirely.
1. https://qz.com/1643554/3m-knew-pfas-was-contaminating-us-foo...
It’s not that simple.
No silicates?
I don’t think PFAs are some essential vitamin or minerals.
But some quantifiable risk information is essential to actually making a useful analysis. Like other types of substances we’ve done nearly the same thing to ourselves over, like dioxins, PCBs, etc.
Most if them might just be as bad as silicones, some of them might be worse, some of them better. And it’s weird that none of that is allowed to be discussed.
You’re the one being performative here.
“Bullshit minutia” is pretty subjective. If my hippy friend says “the govment should ban chemicals in foods”, arguing about what “chemicals” mean is not bullshit it’s critical information for a fact based argument. If anything ignoring facts and logical minutia could be called performative, since then your words matter less than your saying <anything> that tickles feelings.
But for each of these there are dozens of examples where people are hysterical about some new substance, correlations are shown, and it turns out to be nothing. We could be there with low level exposure to PFAs too.
With asbestos, like with cigarettes, there was a form of cancer that almost only appears in people exposed to it. That’s a solid smoking gin that’s totally absent here.
This prediction may turn out to be true, but why should I believe your prediction over that of anyone else's? Do you have some insider knowledge or expertise that you can share?
Edit: Also, what do you give the odds of your prediction, by severity of outcome? I want to see how the odds you provide stack up against the economic and thus social consequences of under-regulation or over-regulation.
There's a perverse incentive to carry on with grossly detrimental products, because an admission that they are detrimental could bring on claims of liability. The penalties have to be harsh enough to overcome that reluctance.
Purdue pharma might not be off the hook yet (didn’t the judgment that protected them from criminal liability get reversed? I admit I don’t know as much about that case.) and did commit mass murder, but this isn’t that. We don’t know that any sizable number of people have even been harmed by these yet, that’s my point. What does one evil corporation have to do with an entirely related other one? Are we supposed to just jail the execs of any corporation who we think may have done something wrong just because of Purdue Pharma?
We know PFAs and the like are in most people in low levels. We know there are a bunch of very weak correlations with various health defects with no indication of causality.
The penalty was harsh. That’s a whopping figure even for a mega corp. I just don’t see the case for jail time here like I do with the Sacklers.