Soon enough, early 2027, my book will be out, and a very careful reader might notice that the last added, most recent citation in my book is an article with a daring title published by an audacious organization in one of the very top journals in the world. But the piece is too important to wait until 2027 to be discussed. The article is “Corporate Vectors of Chronic Disease—Using Internal Industry Documents to Craft Counterstrategies,” by UCSF’s Consortium of the Center to End Corporate Harm, in the New England Journal of Medicine, released just a few weeks ago.
We are more used to thinking of vectors as routes by which communicable diseases spread: malaria spreads to humans through mosquitos, just for instance.
The clear-eyed Consortium, led at the time of writing by Tracey Woodruff, prominently profiled in my book and blog, fits increasing waves of chronic illness into a public health context in an innovative way. They define industries that make toxic contaminated products as vectors for the increase in noncommunicable diseases like cancers, diabetes, neurocognitive disorders, asthma, and other afflictions. They call out the top five industries contributing to human illness and death: fossil fuels (8.1 million deaths), tobacco (7.2 million deaths), ultraprocessed foods (2.3 million deaths), manufactured chemicals and pesticides (1.8 million deaths), and alcohol (1.8 million deaths). This count does not tally illness, only deaths. Here’s how they put it: “They make products (agents) and expose people (hosts) to these products or influence their consumption, which results in health harms.” The Consortium points out that these harms are structural – attributable to the legal obligation of corporations to prioritize shareholder profit and the unconscionable power we have all granted these transnational corporations.
Another shocking thing is that all these industries use a similar playbook, piloted by tobacco and petrochemicals (fossil fuels + chemicals). These sneaky manipulations include capturing the EPA and other agencies, which most Americans trust to protect them from just these kinds of products. The legally recognized “personhood” of corporations allows them to outright purchase our politicians. “Thus, the commercial determinants of health are closely linked to political determinants of health, the government actions (or inactions) that allow corporations to influence product regulation.” All this is clearly laid out in the Industry Documents Library at UCSF, which anyone can freely access and which has produced over 1000 peer-reviewed publications.
The Consortium identifies three main mechanisms by which industry profits by poisoning people: “knowledge capture (influence over science exploring corporate products and their health effects), regulatory or policy capture (influence over decision making, regulation, and agenda setting), and shaping of the public narrative (influence over the public’s preferences for products and perceptions of both harm and the role of personal responsibility).” In my twenty-eight years unraveling the probable causes of my daughter Katherine’s death and the three years of serving on the Children’s Health Advisory Committee to the EPA (CHPAC), I have seen this play out first-hand. This is the story I tell in Poisoning Our Children.
The Consortium asks the medical and public health community to rally against these forces. It points out the while MAHA correctly identifies the role of corporations in harming children’s health, they ignore the role of fossil fuels and the fact that Trump has appointed countless industry lobbyists and scientists to lead the EPA. Progress towards shared goals like decreasing the chemicals our children are exposed to is vanishingly unlikely.
This week, Elizabeth Kolbert laid out the innumerable ways the Trump administration is destroying the already-meager ability of the EPA to protect us. Administrator Lee Zeldin has outdone even previous Trump appointees in firing scientists, hiring corporate stooges, and undermining the environmental health of the entire nation. Children will die and be born increasingly pre-polluted because of them. At least there are some few scientists and institutions brave enough to speak out as we see it all unfold.
