The Doubt Factory

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Shove it, Kook. They’re out there right now, making money while people die. They’re making money, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank because no one stops them.”

  Cynthia sighed. “It’s just that no one cares, Moses.”

  “They only don’t care because they don’t know.”

  “Sure they do,” Cynthia said. “Everybody knows. People say it all the time. ‘Corporations control politicians.’ ‘Money controls politics.’ ‘Lobbyists control Congress.’ ‘Corporations write the laws.’ ‘The politicians are all corrupt.’ ‘The little guy doesn’t matter.’”

  The others were nodding at her words.

  “Everybody already knows, Moses. Everybody says those things. It’s probably the one thing you can get a bunch of Republicans and Democrats to agree on: The system’s rigged. We all know it. The truth is that people just don’t care. We’re just starting to think that it’s not worth dying for something that no one cares about anyway.”

  Moses wanted to tear out his hair. “I thought we were trying to make people care!”

  “Maybe it can’t be done!” Cynthia shot back. “Even the Doubt Factory doesn’t take money to make people care. They take money to do the opposite. Status quo is easy to sell. People like to be nice and consistent. They like to be told to just stay in their seats, and don’t worry about the theater burning. So what are we selling? Revolution?” Cynthia laughed sadly. “Who wants to buy that?”

  “It happened in the Middle East.”

  “We’ve kind of got it better than they do,” Kook observed.

  “So… what? We just sit here and let them go because they aren’t screwing over enough people? Just a few? Just us? Just our families?”

  Cynthia stood up. “Be serious, Moses. It’s dangerous. We’ve got the FBI on us for sure now.”

  Kook was nodding. “Definitely got Williams and Crowe’s attention. Those fuckers are playing for keeps now. I’ve got trackers all over them, and they’re like a bunch of stirred-up hornets. They got clients who are shitting about us, wondering who’s next. You know it wasn’t an accident they used gas like that. They don’t want us just caught, they want us dead.”

  “I don’t know about you all, but I’m playing for keeps, too.”

  Tank finally spoke. Small voice, small kid looking up at him. “We all saw the rats, Moses. We all saw them. If we’d been inside, what would have happened? If we hadn’t set everything up perfect…”

  “But we did!”

  “No way, boss,” Kook interjected. “That was not perfect. We barely got on the news. Nobody gives a shit. And if we keep going like this, we’re going to be just like those rats. Just a pile of dead kids. We’ll be on the news, all right, but it will be one of those ‘What’s Wrong With Teens These Days’ stories, right up there with the chicks on Girls Gone Wild.”

  “So we can make them—”

  “Moses,” Cynthia interrupted. “What’s the first rule of your uncle’s cons?”

  “Trust…”

  “No. It’s to make sure that you’re the one who’s running the con. Not the one who’s being conned. Don’t trick yourself into thinking people are different than they are. We’ve already been doing this a long time. Nothing changes people. Nothing.”

  She looked sad. “I’m sorry, Moses. Maybe it’s time to grow up. We can’t fix things that people don’t want fixed. You can’t con someone who doesn’t want to be conned, and you can’t wake up someone who doesn’t want to wake up.”

  “I just don’t want to end up like the rats,” Tank said.

  28

  IT STARTED AS AN EXPERIMENT. A quick test to see what would come back. Even though it felt disloyal to her father, Alix couldn’t shake off the need to test if any of it was real.

  She started with aspirin. Moses had mentioned it in passing, during one of his screeds against the evils of industry.

  It was just an experiment. A quick search on Google. Let’s see how crazypants 2.0 is. She typed:

  Aspirin, Reye’s syndrome.

  She almost immediately arrived at the Aspirin Foundation’s page—which had a clear link to a page about Reye’s syndrome.

  Alix read over the page of material, scanning for something to hook onto. At the bottom of the page, it concluded:

  There is a lack of convincing evidence that aspirin causes Reye syndrome: it may be one of many possible factors but many cases currently reported are probably due to inborn errors of metabolism. It is unclear whether restricting aspirin use by children has a favourable risk/benefit ratio.

  So much for that conspiracy theory, she thought.

  She was about to close her laptop, but she could practically see Moses laughing at her.

  “That’s it? That’s what Seitz research is? I thought they at least taught you rich kids how to work.”

  “Oh, just shut up, why don’t you?” she muttered. But she could remember him in the warehouse, watching Tank skateboard. Him shaking his head and saying, “Whenever I think I’m cynical, I find out I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

  So what would a cynic do? Alix wondered. She immediately abbreviated the question to WWCD.

  WWCD?

  A cynic wouldn’t trust anyone. She went back to the top of the page and scanned for information on the Aspirin Foundation.

  About the Foundation led to supporters, which led to:

  Bayer HealthCare AG

  When she clicked through, Bayer’s tagline said, “Science for a Better Life.”

  Alix’s eyes narrowed. Bayer, huh? She could feel her inner cynic suddenly engaging, despite herself.

  Leaving her first window open, she opened a new tab and searched again:

  Aspirin, Reye’s syndrome

  She hesitated, remembering Moses saying, “You know what they call your dad’s company? The Doubt Factory.”

  With a hiss of anxiety, she added the word that the 2.0 crew were so obsessed with:

  Doubt

  Almost immediately a link to defendingscience.org popped up. It wasn’t as slick as the Aspirin Foundation’s site, but it was interesting. It seemed to be electronic excerpts from a book called Doubt Is Their Product, which some guy had written for Oxford University Press.

  Its opening pages began:

  Since 1986 every bottle of aspirin sold in the United States has included a label advising parents that consumption by children with viral illnesses greatly increases their risk of developing Reye’s syndrome.…

  Alix kept reading, and as she did, she found herself becoming more and more appalled.

  In the early 1980s, scientists discovered that aspirin was causing Reye’s syndrome in children. Immediately, the Centers for Disease Control notified doctors that children were in danger from the deadly illness that affected the brain and liver and appeared to be connected with taking aspirin when they had a viral infection like the flu or chicken pox.

  So far, so good.

  Then the government tried to notify the public. The Food and Drug Administration wanted to put a warning label on aspirin bottles. Even though doctors had been warned, aspirin was an over-the-counter medicine; it made sense that moms and dads should be warned that aspirin was a no-no for their little kids. Parents were the people buying the stuff, after all. There wasn’t a doctor standing in the supermarket aisle to warn them. A warning label made sense.

  But then the aspirin industry got involved. They threw up barriers to labeling. They said that the government was being overly activist and that the science wasn’t settled. They fought—and the Food and Drug Administration backed down.

  For two more years the government and doctors knew that an over-the-counter medicine millions of parents were buying for their kids was dangerous, but the parents weren’t being informed. It finally took a lawsuit by Public Citizen’s Health Research Group to force the FDA to act.

  Eventually—finally—aspirin was labeled.

  So who was this guy, this David Michaels, who had written the book? His bio sa
id he was a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health—and it seemed that someone liked him, because he’d not only served in the government under President Clinton but was also now serving as the assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the current liberal president.

  Half of Alix’s friends would have called Michaels a liberal, socialist traitor for that… but she also noticed in his biography on OSHA’s website that the Senate had unanimously confirmed him. Unanimously? Alix was a little surprised at that. She couldn’t remember the last time Republicans and Democrats had agreed on anything. Either they were all asleep at his confirmation hearing, or someone actually thought Michaels knew something.

  Regardless, a few things seemed fairly undeniable.

  Reye’s syndrome cases had started dropping from a high of more than five hundred cases a year as soon as the Centers for Disease Control started howling about how dangerous aspirin was for little kids.

  After aspirin got its warning label, Reye’s syndrome cases collapsed to around thirty a year.

  And, of course, there was one last thing:

  3. The aspirin industry had fought against warning labels, tooth and nail. They’d used legal threats and obfuscation and political leverage to delay the process as long as possible.

  Alix searched around some more and came up with a 1982 New York Times article. It was fascinating to see into the history of the fight. Right there, on the page, the aspirin industry was vowing to fight the labeling initiative. The Aspirin Foundation of America was quoted:

  Dr. Joseph White, the foundation’s president, said studies purporting to link the syndrome and aspirin are “wholly inconclusive.” The foundation also released a statement in Washington saying that the Department of Health and Human Services “acted hastily and without scientific basis” in calling for the warning label. Dr. White has asked for the chance to present the industry’s views before the Food and Drug Administration takes further action.

  It was fascinating to see the language White had used. The accusations of rushed judgment, the claims that the decision lacked scientific basis—it was exactly the playbook that Moses and the rest of the 2.0 crew had described.

  Fascinating. And then, a little chilling, because the Aspirin Foundation of America had apparently succeeded. They’d kept a warning label off aspirin bottles for four years.

  How much extra money did four extra years without a warning label get them?

  Enough to justify killing a fair number of kids, apparently.

  Alix did some quick math, based on the numbers she’d been reading. If 30 percent of the Reye’s syndrome cases typically ended in death, that meant that more than a hundred and fifty kids had died each year that aspirin labeling was delayed.

  Four times one-fifty, conservatively. Six hundred bodies so aspirin could make a little extra cash.

  “Whenever I think I’m cynical, I find out I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

  “No shit,” Alix muttered.

  She closed the computer, feeling unclean.

  Aspirin. It seemed like such an innocuous thing.

  Alix thought of her mom taking aspirin. She went down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. In the master bath, she found the aspirin right inside the medicine cabinet, along with Tylenol and Advil. Alix looked darkly at the two other painkillers. “I don’t have time for you, too.”

  She plucked out the Bayer aspirin. She sat on the edge of the marble tub and turned the bottle over to study the warning label.

  WARNINGS—REYE’S SYNDROME

  A simple box warning right in there with all the rest of the standard drug info. All it said was not to give it to children and teenagers if they had symptoms from flu or chicken pox. Such a small thing. And yet it had apparently sent executives at aspirin companies into a panic. Their product was under attack. They needed a defender.

  And someone like her father had probably provided the product-defense playbook: the science wasn’t sound, don’t rush to judgment…

  Delay = $$$

  Alix sat on the edge of her parents’ whirlpool tub with the bottle of aspirin in her hand, thinking of her father, feeling more and more unclean.

  29

  “HOW MUCH LONGER TILL EVERYONE’S done packing?” Moses asked Cynthia. They were loading gear into a van that Kook had rented. Her hair was now red and she’d changed her earrings and piercings. Cyn’s hair was bobbed short, and she was wearing her makeup differently. Moses was amazed at how a few bits of blush or toner or eye shadow could totally change the impression of a person’s face.

  Cynthia had bemoaned the loss of her lustrous hair, but she’d donated it to some wig maker that helped cancer victims, so she figured it wasn’t a total loss. Someone would like all that hair. Adam had shifted from hipster with his porkpie hat to all-American athlete, as if he’d never left the fine Mormon confines of Utah. And Moses, well, he’d turned himself into a young Wall Street turk, full suit, leather briefcase. A suit and a briefcase carried so much authority in America that the only thing better was a police uniform.

  Tank hadn’t bothered changing anything.

  Skate rat’s a skate rat, was all he said. Nobody notices skate rats.

  Cyn looked up from her packing. “This is almost everything. We’re totally cleared out.” She stared around the empty space. “I’m going to miss this place.”

  “Yeah, well.” Moses shrugged. “What’s the point?”

  All their work had come to nothing. All the money, all the planning, all the time. And it had disappeared so quickly.

  Right back where we started.

  Right back down in the hole with all the lunatic activists, everyone from the antiwar protesters to the 9/11 conspiracists, to PETA, to the antivaccine weenies. Relegated to the nutjob end of the spectrum. Just one more bunch of radicals in a frothy soup of radicals.

  “You okay with this?” Adam asked as he loaded more boxes.

  “Yeah,” Moses said. “You’re right. It’s over. No way we’re going to win against these assholes.”

  “Sorry your girl didn’t work out.”

  Moses laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, well, I got too wrapped up in that, didn’t I?”

  “I never did see what you saw in her.”

  “Ass,” Cyn said, as she went to gather more of their gear. “She had a nice ass.”

  Moses ignored her. “You going to be okay?” he asked Adam.

  “Oh, sure.” Adam grinned. “I’m heading for Florida. There’s a guy down there, wants me to DJ at his club.”

  “A good-looking Cuban boy,” Kook added. “Biceps like this.” She mimed the muscles. “Sexy as hell.”

  Adam shot her a glare. “Would you please stay out of my e-mail?”

  Kook batted her black lashes. “You’ll miss me when I’m not looking over your shoulder all the time. I’m the only one who will kick sense into you.”

  Adam shook his head and grabbed his gym bag. “I’m going to be so glad to have privacy.”

  “Just you and the NSA,” Kook quipped.

  Moses held out a hand to Adam. “Take care of yourself.”

  Adam looked at him strangely, but he took the offered hand in a strong grip, and then pulled Moses into a hug. “Don’t do anything crazy,” he said, as he let Moses go.

  “Crazy?” Moses shook his head. “Nah. I still got some money left. Maybe I’ll go around the world on a trip or something. Kick it on a beach somewhere. Watch the world burn down with a piña colada, you know?”

  “And then?”

  “Can’t be bothered to worry about that. Maybe back out to Vegas. I hear there’s a guy out there knows how to pick pockets in public. Makes a show out of it. I always wanted to learn that.”

  “Shit, I’ll bet you end up teaching him.”

  “Maybe.” Moses laughed. “Maybe.”

  Cyn came out hauling two more suitcases. Adam and Moses went and grabbed them from her. Moses grunted at the weight.
“You got rocks in here?”

  “They’re nice clothes,” Cyn defended herself. “I’m not wasting them.”

  “You’ll blend right in at the Ivy Leagues,” Kook said.

  “It’s going to be weird to sit in classes that are actually new to me.”

  They slung the suitcases into the back of the van. Cyn and Adam pulled out, waving. Tank came out of the warehouse, hauling grocery bags full of hard drives to Kook’s car. Moses helped carry out the flatscreens and slide them into the back of the station wagon, buffered by blankets.

  When Kook finished and closed the hatch on the station wagon, she said, “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

  Moses shrugged. “Shit happens.”

  She handed him a USB stick. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Her. Video. Her greatest hits. Case you want to relive the fun. A lot of shots of her eating cereal.”

  Moses took the USB stick.

  “It was a good run,” Kook said. She slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Yeah. Too bad the world didn’t give a fuck.”

  “The world’s give-a-fuck was broken a long time before any of us came along. Not your fault.” She turned. “Come on, Tank!”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I got an aunt in Colorado. Crazy hippie lady. Figure we’ll lie low with her. Let Tank get his driver’s license or something.” She turned and shouted toward the warehouse. “Tank!”

  “I’m right here,” he said quietly. He’d been on the other side of the car.

  “Would you quit lurking like that?” Kook waved him into the car. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

  “Be there in a second.”

  “Sure. Say good-bye.” She climbed into the car and started the engine. Tank sidled over to Moses.

  “When are you heading out?” Tank asked.

  “Soon.”

  Tank was looking down at his shoes. “You never really said where you were going.”