The asbestos industry cover-up
Asbestos manufacturers knew by the 1930s that their product killed the people who worked with it. They edited the medical literature, kept diagnoses from workers, and kept selling for another forty years.
Why this verdict
Confirmed by the Sumner Simpson papers, introduced as evidence in US product liability litigation, showing manufacturers suppressed medical findings from the 1930s onward.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That asbestos producers concealed medical evidence of asbestosis and mesothelioma, influenced the publication of research they funded, and deliberately withheld diagnoses from their own employees to avoid liability.
02Where it came from
Asbestos was a miracle material — fireproof, cheap, versatile — and disease from it takes decades to appear, which made concealment unusually easy and unusually profitable. Industrial medicine identified asbestosis in British textile workers in 1930 in the Merewether and Price report to Parliament. American manufacturers commissioned their own research and then took control of what it said.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
In 1977 a South Carolina attorney obtained correspondence from Raybestos-Manhattan president Sumner Simpson, dating from the 1930s, during discovery in a liability suit. In one 1935 exchange, the editor of the trade journal Asbestos asks permission to publish on asbestosis; Simpson and Johns-Manville's Vandiver Brown agree that the least said the better, with Brown writing that 'our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum of publicity'.
The papers also document manufacturers funding the Saranac Laboratory and retaining the right to approve publications, resulting in the removal of cancer findings from a 1948 report. Company physicians at Johns-Manville were instructed not to tell workers about abnormal chest X-rays; a former medical director testified to the practice, and one executive's reported justification — that a man should work until he drops — became a fixture of subsequent trials.
The scientific question was settled outside industry control in 1964, when Irving Selikoff's study of insulation workers established the cancer link publicly and unignorably.
04What it cost
The World Health Organization attributes more than 200,000 deaths a year to occupational asbestos exposure, and the disease burden is still rising in countries that banned it late or not at all. Johns-Manville filed for bankruptcy in 1982 under the weight of claims and its reorganisation created the model for asbestos trust funds, which have paid out tens of billions of dollars. The litigation is the largest mass tort in US history and is not finished.