There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a completely eyeball driven enterprise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic...
https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutter reviews for kettles, "The Man Who Caught Marilyn Monroe’s Skirt on Film," "Where #VanLife meets #SkiBum," the size of the surf waves, etc etc etc, but nothing on the train derailment.
Have these articles been showing up on the main page and I keep missing them? Or are they permanently buried in the "US News" section where I'm sure only a small fraction of Times digital readers ever turn to?
Most of it gets surfaced largely by algorithm. And it’s evident the algorithm is not tracking any interest from readers.
That's the point.
Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly.
Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal.
Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like.
