I have a strong aversion to comments like this, because they come across as extremely generic. Are you really very knowledgeable about the Dutch justice system, that being where Philips is headquartered? Philips are gonna lose at least $400m from this: what makes you so certain that the justice system is "completely broken", or that manslaughter charges are what they deserve? Have you compared the justice system with, let's say, Russian justice or Zimbabwean justice? I think the latter are a great deal more broken.
Casual cynicism is as foolish as casual naivety, and more toxic and dangerous.
They killed at least 561 people, knew about it, covered it up for years, and you want to debate whether manslaughter charges might be appropriate? Any justice system which allows that to happen without imprisoning the people responsible for the rest of their lives is completely broken, says me.
It's not casual cynicism either, at this point it's professional cynicism because we've all seen this film 1000 times before and we know how it typically ends. Personally I'd reserve the use of words such as "toxic" and "dangerous" for Philips' CPAP machines and their leadership.
They're going to pay less than $1 million per victim while their annual profits are in the billions. Would you feel good about that amount if they killed your dad, mom, brother, sister, son or daughter?
I don't know anything about this case, but "561 deaths have been reported in connection to" does not mean they were all indeed "caused by". They may have reports of anyone who died while using the device, from whatever cause like old age. Now they will investigate and hopefully conclude something.
To add onto this, this article describes the absurdity of this situation and complete indifference to human life at Philips. Notably, they kept using the same problematic foam for over a decade after they knew it was dangerous.
> In June 2010, Philips found that a machine sent back to the company by a customer was contaminated with “foam particles,” FDA records show. Rather than alerting the government as federal law required, records reveal that the company kept the report about the problem in-house for the next decade.
> A similar report came in the following year, describing another CPAP with “black contamination.” That, too, was not turned over to federal regulators.
> Another report was also held back, this one from a patient who found particles in the tube that carries air to the nose and mouth. A complaint two years later described a 3-year-old girl who was using a ventilator with a filter that had turned black.
> By the end of 2014 — about six years after Philips started using the foam — more than 500 reports from health care workers, patients and others had flooded the company in a pattern that would not be revealed to the government or the public for years, the records show.
> [...]
> In 2015, Philips was moving to dominate the market, but the foam problem threatened the momentum. That year, a company engineer questioned the supplier, emailing, “Have you ever seen this occur to the foam?” company records show.
> Two and a half years later, as new complaints came in from Australia, Philips scientists were summoned to a series of emergency meetings outside Pittsburgh to come up with a plan. The day after one of the sessions, another engineer detailed the safety risk in an email to the foam supplier.
> “The material sheds and is pulled into the ventilator air path. As you can imagine, this is not a good situation for our users,” engineer Vincent Testa wrote that April, sharing photos of the foam breaking apart. “I flagged this message with high importance since we are addressing a potential safety concern.”
> Without alerting the FDA or the public, the company started replacing the foam in some ventilators but once again left the vast majority of machines untouched, including the widely used DreamStation, FDA records show. Testa did not respond to interview requests.
> Customers weren’t told even as debris turned up on their bedsheets, pillows and faces.
> [...]
> In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 virus raged and thousands died, Philips boosted production of another ventilator to help ease the burden on overwhelmed intensive care units.
> These, too, were built with the same foam.
> Over the course of the year, operating profits from ventilators, CPAP machines and other devices soared to about $800 million, more than double what they were the year before, according to reports by Philips’ parent company.
> Response from customers “remains very positive, resulting in market share gains,” Royal Philips’ then-CEO Frans van Houten said during a fourth-quarter earnings call.
> During the call, van Houten made no mention of the turmoil inside the company, including internal studies that showed the DreamStation had failed emissions testing for volatile organic compounds. The chemicals can be found in everyday products, such as gasoline, paints and pesticides, but in breathing machines, the fumes can be inhaled for hours at a stretch.
> [...]
> In April 2021, Philips unveiled the DreamStation 2, a sleeker and more advanced model with a color touch screen and more personalized settings. Another change separated the new model from the old one: Philips chose different foam, one that would hold up in heat and humidity.
> With the launch of the new device, the company’s stock price reached a high of $61 a share — more than double what it was five years earlier.
> It was only then, during a late-April earnings call with investors, that Philips for the first time revealed that the foam it had used for years in millions of machines was at risk of breaking down.
> “Regretfully, we have identified possible risks,” said then-CEO van Houten, adding that the company had set aside 250 million euros to deal with the problem. “We are taking proactive action here.”
> Van Houten went on to reassure investors: “The device is safe to be continued to use to the best of our knowledge at this time.”
> [...]
> As news of the problem spread, customers and others stepped forward by the thousands, describing emergency room visits and sudden illnesses in reports submitted to Philips and the government. The reports detailed nearly 2,000 cases of cancer, 600 liver and kidney illnesses and 17,000 respiratory ailments.
> Philips said the reports of illnesses and injuries are not evidence that its devices caused harm. But six medical experts who spoke to ProPublica and the Post-Gazette said the complaints are an indisputable indicator of a sprawling public health crisis. They said more harm is likely to emerge in coming years, much as the effects of tobacco and asbestos only became clear decades later.
I want to debate whether Philips actually committed corporate manslaughter. That's law, not semantics. The OP said the executives should be in jail for manslaughter. Do you think the criterion for going to jail for manslaughter should be "it made people feel angry on a website"? I don't.
Nothing. Am I supposed to be an educated lawyer to comment on the morally bankrupt state of our "justice" system that allows corporations to get away with clear, obvious, documented-over-many-years, manslaughter?
You should read the article I linked in a sibling comment.
I think it is obvious that you cannot say what counts as manslaughter if you don't in fact know what counts as manslaughter. "Something I read about in an article, where people died and it seemed very wrong" is not the definition, and shouldn't be, for obvious reasons.
I opened my argument by stating that the justice system is broken due to decades of political inbreeding. That's not a verifiable fact, that's my opinion. You keep trying to drag me into semantic debates about the specifics of what the law are, when my argument has always been about what the law ought to be.
I'm confident that the law aligns with my notion of what the law "ought to be" in this case because the damage is so clear, with years of documented coverups. Whether I'm right or wrong on this is really besides the point.
If you insist on arguing in support of corporations being allowed to kill people with impunity, please don't waste my time with it.
> "Something I read about in an article, where people died and it seemed very wrong"
That's such a bad faith take on the article that goes into exhaustive detail and pinpoint accurate accounting of events with many insider sources and commentary from medical professionals, you must be trolling.
They killed people for money. They will get away with it because the managerial class is generally not held responsible for their actions. One legal system is not immune from criticism just because worse ones exist.
I'd feel differently if some people died because their CPAP wasn't operating as well as it should have, too low pressure, etc. But this was a design decision to put material in the airflow that you should know would degrade and cause people to aspirate. It's pretty unusual negligence of design, followed by denial and a coverup.
I'd go as far as to say that mistakes will always happen, so even if this was a design defect, it could've been handled in a way that doesn't result in people going to prison.
As soon as you catch wind of this sort of issue, this is what should be legally required to happen in order to escape lengthy prison time:
- immediately take full responsibility and take your products off the market
- work with relevant agencies to identify impact and produce a list of everyone who could be affected
- recall every device that could possibly suffer from the same issue
- offer to pay for preventative medical exams for any customer who's suffering from any early symptoms
- offer at least 7-8 figure sum of money to each victim's family
- fix the design defect and publish a full transparency report that details the issue and how it was addressed, verified by a relevant agency
Just to rub it in, Philips gets to settle without admitting any wrongdoing.
Because when a corporation has put profit over people and the people were harmed or killed, that corporation deserves to be completely dismantled and the owners (yes: shareholders too) deserve jail.
Until capitalism stops treating people like they are a renewable resource to squeeze profit from - capitalists need to be put on notice that acting like criminals means they get treated like criminals.
Casual cynicism is as foolish as casual naivety, and more toxic and dangerous.