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Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

The problem with that, is that the company investigated itself and found no problems. And as others pointed out, the mines were known to contain asbestos and they continued anyway.

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There’s a lack of evidence of asbestos in the final consumer product. That seems materially important.

It does seem sporadic on whether it ends up in the product, but since we're talking about product from 40-50 years ago, it's hard to say what was present in the old product.

Notably - in the 1950s, the USGS published guides on where to mine asbestos in the US [1]. This map is the precise geo coordinates that the USGS included for the Ludlow site and then the site of the Vermont J&J talc mine... literally 2 miles between the two. So again, consider my credulity strained that the only found contamination a handful of times decades ago mining talc directly next to known asbestos deposits.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/43.383623,-72.647868/Argonau...

[1] Page 7 in Windsor County: https://web.archive.org/web/20200319042340id_/https://pubs.u...

A 2 mile distance is highly circumstantial. There are several big leaps here. The potential pervasiveness of asbestos in the talc is not well established. The exposure of the plaintiffs is not established. The link between trace asbestos in talc and the cancer in question is not well established. No other complicating factors were ruled out. It's just maybes all the way down.

Yes it is possible that J&J was careless, and the the product was tainted, and these plaintiffs were exposed, and their cancer was caused by that exposure but the evidence is VERY thin.

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