There’s always a temptation for regulators and policy-makers and their advisors to take money from the very interests they are regulating/overseeing/legislating. It recently came out that the epidemiologist Richard Doll, who famously established the link between smoking and cancer, was a paid consultant to the chemical industry, even when he was conducting a government study on the hazards of Agent Orange. He also worked for Newall, a British asbestos manufacturer.
There is so much money tied up in asbestos that we must always look at the motivations and backgrounds of anyone making statements about the facts.