The story is, unfortunately, sickeningly familiar to anyone who pays attention to capitalist malfeasance. The story usually goes:
A firm makes a decision to alter a product to be more competitive. (In this case, Philips was racing with competitors to create a quieter CPAP machine.) The decision turns out to be bad and harm customers. The firm, rather than protecting customers at its own cost, forges ahead and hides the harm, lies about it, denies it, until the weight of evidence is insurmountable and the firm belatedly takes steps to remedy the problem while fighting torts against it.
We could be talking about Philips or the Ford Pinto; we could be talking about cigarettes or fossil fuels. They all know; they know virtually from the first moment that they’re harming customers; they do it anyway.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
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