"It's probably not that bad" "The results weren't conclusive" "Look, this product was used by millions, we'd know if there was a problem..."

Never depend on a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.

The system is designed for humans to behave like this. Big corporations allow blame to be diluted across an entire organization, meaning you face very little individual risk as an employee of the company. Furthermore, the employee's job and compensation depend on making the company money.

You do not make money by avoiding a catastrophe that could cost a company money. If you avoid a potential future lawsuit by removing the asbestos, how does that look on a company balance sheet? Looks like you spent money removing the asbestos, but there is no gain from avoiding the lawsuit.

So unless the employee feels the lawsuit is inevitable and imminent, why bother? It's just going to hurt the bottom line and provide no increase in revenue. Even worse, if the public catches on to you fixing the problem, then that could expose the problem existed in the first place.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair

This quote gets brought out a lot, for good reason, but I think people don’t quite grasp its meaning. It’s often understood as meaning that people will play dumb in order to resist you. But it goes deeper than that. A person will literally have a difficult time understanding something if that understanding will put their livelihood on the line.

I would wager that essentially everybody involved in this process had a twisted understanding of the problem that left them convinced that what they were doing was harmless.