People involved in covering up health dangers should be personally responsible for their criminal actions and prosecuted the hard way.
If we had any means whatsoever to change that situation it would have been done ages ago because it isn't as if the piles of dead bodies and deformed infants weren't enough to enrage people. Recently the Sacklers got away with it too and people are rightly pissed about it, but they're also totally powerless which is why it will happen again and again and again.
We can make it happen. It's just a legislative change away.
This brings in an interesting dilemma. Lobbying for such a legislation change would most probably damage the initiator.
What was the last time legislation was voted on that caused the collapse of one of the largest corporations in the world? When was the last time a corporation that poisoned a massive number of people was held truly accountable and the victims were actually made whole?
Maybe you still think we have the power to make those kinds of changes, but what's your evidence for that?
Even if we somehow did manage to get the laws passed (which we can't) they'd be quickly overturned or worked around. We fought like hell to get regulatory agencies that were created to protect us from exactly the kinds of biological and ecological harms we suffer under yet they've all been captured by industry or made toothless. Legalized bribery, a largely ignorant and uneducated public, and a broken legal system all conspire to protect profits over people and nothing suggests meaningful change is possible, let alone likely.
That is very defeatist. Many things have changed in our history. Public advocacy can and do lead to changes in public attitudes and changes in public attitudes lead to changes in our laws.
History is filled with examples of companies getting away with this again and again, and shows us that only with massive amounts of effort has anything ever been done to improve consumer and environmental safety, and even then the few small steps we've managed to make toward change have been largely overturned or worked around.
Today nearly half the country has been successfully manipulated into thinking that strong regulation, government oversight, and holding corporations accountable for the harms they cause is a terrible idea. In fact, often it's the people who are most impacted by the environmental and biological harms created by these companies who would most likely oppose the environmental reforms and regulations needed to prevent them.
They're convinced that the economy will collapse if we make the changes we'd need. They're more motivated to vote against "frivolous" lawsuits and punitive damages than holding companies accountable. They consistently vote to weaken people's ability to seek justice, increase the influence of money in politics, and remove what few regulations constrain industry.
Meanwhile, even when most people are in full agreement that something needs to be done, bribery has been effectively legalized and regulatory agencies are either toothless or run by the same corporations and industries they're supposed to be keeping in line. Regulations are written by and for industry to prevent competitors and protect profits over people.
Yes, it's possible that magically one day things will change, and I genuinely think that would be a good thing, but I have zero confidence that it will because there's nothing to pin my hopes on. What reason is there to assume that things will improve?
Classic prisoners dilemma. which makes me wonder what the prisoners dilemma looks like with different points distributions for each outcome if it changes the long term strategy. if you can adjust the points so you can predetermine "rational" strategy for an agent.
Instead we call companies people and let them wash things away with money. No one faces guilt, maybe a CEO 'steps down' to spend more time with family until the anti-competitive clause finished and they pop up somewhere else.
At a minimum, liability must be possible for the entire C-suite and the board.
Depending on the nature and degree of the atrocities being committed, I can see a pretty strong argument for liability for anyone involved in any way who's being paid more than, say, national median salary + 50%—that is, anyone for whom "I was just following orders" doesn't have with it the background of "and if I disobeyed, I would risk destitution for myself and my family." The horrible effects of some of these decisions, and the number of people who have to suffer them, mean I have no compunction about comparing acts like these to war crimes, and we don't allow "I was just following orders" as a defense to those, either.
This is the central point. Reacting to such stuff after everything is poisoned already is a stupid way to go about things.
What is needed is robust precautionary regulation.
It can be tricky to define and demonstrate a specific level of precaution. Precaution is always limited, at some point you have to stop testing and start producing something at reasonable cost.
Precautionary regulation is orthogonal to responsibility of individuals putting public health, safety or environment at risk and knowingly hiding the risks. Even if we could argue that strong responsibility encourage precaution with no further regulation: something too risky would be cancelled quickly or C-levels would risk serious jail time and bankruptcy.