Dorfman et al. Respond

Kraak et al. offer a model of corporate accountability that, if adopted by agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and others, would be of great service to public health. Their framework takes our conceptualizations of responsibility to the next level.

The object of historical investigation is to apply an understanding of the past to look forward. Looking back to the pre-1964 Surgeon General’s report era, we were reminded of a time when Americans were not timid about the need for government intervention in the face of health harms. The irony is that in those circumstances it would have been easier to advance the type of robust corporate accountability rubric that Kraak et al. propose, yet the need for such actions would have been less apparent. By contrast, the need is evident now, but given the vilification of government and ascendancy of corporate power that the authors acknowledge, that need will be difficult to answer.