At the forefront of the current round of scientific-sounding attacks against policies to reduce involuntary exposures to health and safety hazards in the environment and the workplace, we find one rather new line of argument and one laden with déjà vu. First, opponents of regulation have now moved the goalposts and are insisting on more rigorous—and unattainable—evidence for “causality” than ever before. But they have also returned to a very old complaint; that dose-response functions have thresholds we don’t dare ignore. This talk debunks both sets of arguments, and claims that the skeptics are not “manufacturing doubt” as much as they are manufacturing sloth—turning society away from low-regret protections while we wait for needless certainty.
Department of Environmental Health Sciences: Center for Occupational Health and Safety EngineeringInside the “Manufactured Doubt†Factory: The Latest Attacks on Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology
University of Michigan Environmental Health Sciences Clinical Professor Adam M. Finkel, Sc.D., CIH
April 13, 2023
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
1655 SPH I
1415 Washington Heights
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029
Sponsored by: Department of Environmental Health Sciences: Center for Occupational Health and Safety Engineering
Contact Information: Kaley James (Kaleyj@umich.edu)
At the forefront of the current round of scientific-sounding attacks against policies to reduce involuntary exposures to health and safety hazards in the environment and the workplace, we find one rather new line of argument and one laden with déjà vu. First, opponents of regulation have now moved the goalposts and are insisting on more rigorous—and unattainable—evidence for “causality” than ever before. But they have also returned to a very old complaint; that dose-response functions have thresholds we don’t dare ignore. This talk debunks both sets of arguments, and claims that the skeptics are not “manufacturing doubt” as much as they are manufacturing sloth—turning society away from low-regret protections while we wait for needless certainty.
