Fall of Talc Reveals Pattern of Problems at J&J
- Johnson & Johnson discontinues sales of it's iconic talcum powder in US
- Company faces thousands of consumer lawsuits over cancer claims
- J&J faces nearly 100,000 product liability claims
Many American consumers will be shocked to find Johnson’s Baby Powder disappear soon from store shelves. The iconic product in familiar white canisters has been a trusted staple of parents’ baby care arsenal for more than 125 years.
In an announcement May 19, buried beneath the crush of Covid-19 news, Johnson & Johnson said it would discontinue sales of its baby talcum powder in North America as soon as current supplies run out. Mentions of baby powder have been scrubbed from the company’s website.
The decision comes as the company faces thousands of consumer lawsuits alleging the powder caused deadly ovarian and lung cancers and a U.S. Department of Justice criminal investigation into whether and when the company knew or suspected the product was dangerous.
While many consumers will be taken by surprise, people who closely follow business and legal news are wondering whether they are seeing the emergence of a pattern.
J&J in recent years has been the target of more consumer product liability lawsuits than the other top 10 largest pharmaceutical companies combined.
In the course of lawsuits, companies typically are required by the court to make public relevant internal documents. During this process, J&J corporate documents have come to light which reveal apparent knowledge by J&J executives of problems with various products that subsequently injured consumers. Those who have been winning lawsuits against J&J claim that the company failed to adequately warn the public -- or even hid information from the public -- about the potential for harm.
Here’s a look at revelations from lawsuits that may show a pattern:
Johnson’s Baby Powder
About 20,000 consumers have sued J&J, claiming its talcum powder caused one of two very deadly cancers: mesothelioma, an incurable cancer of the lining of the lung believed to be caused almost exclusively by exposure to asbestos, or ovarian cancer which usually isn’t detected until it has spread.
Talc and asbestos are naturally occurring minerals often found in the ground in close proximity to each other.
J&J vehemently denies that its talcum powder was contaminated with asbestos. But internal corporate documents and other evidence emerged in the course of consumer lawsuits that conflict with the company’s public statements.
Reuters news service dug into those documents and court testimony and reported that “from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.”
A jury in St. Louis, Missouri, which heard the evidence in 2018 awarded $4.7 billion to 22 women with ovarian cancer or their survivors.
Judge Rex Burlison upheld the verdict.
“First, substantial evidence was adduced at the trial of particularly reprehensible conduct on the part of defendants, including that defendants knew of the presence of asbestos in products that they knowingly targeted for sale to mothers and babies, knew of the damage their products caused, and misrepresented the safety of these products for decades. Second, defendants’ actions caused significant physical harm and potential physical harm, including causing ovarian cancer in plaintiffs or plaintiffs’ decedents,” Burlison wrote.
“The evidence presented at trial includes the testimony of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, evidence of the testing of the products at issue, including defendants’ own testing, defendants’ correspondence and the testimony of defendants’ corporate representative and chief medical officer. This evidence satisfies the standards for causation under all applicable state law.”
Following the verdict, the DOJ opened an investigation into whether J&J lied about cancer risks of its baby powder.
And U.S. Sen. Edward Markey called on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to investigate.
“Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder is an iconic consumer product, used by countless American families…That the company may have concealed a potentially serious health and safety risk associated with the use of its baby powder is deeply troubling,” Markey wrote.
Anti-psychotic Risperdal
More than 13,000 boys and young men have sued Johnson & Johnson for failing to adequately warn the public that Risperdal could cause pre-adolescent boys to grow large and permanent female breasts. The deformity socially and psychologically devastated the boys during childhood and requires major surgery to fix.
As more evidence and company documents have emerged in the course of individual lawsuits, verdicts against J&J have grown dramatically.
Risperdal was approved by the FDA in 1993 for adult schizophrenics. In defiance of the FDA and to increase profits, the company marketed the drug as a treatment for a wide variety of behavioral issues with children.
Evidence has shown that the company knew that Risperdal could cause breast growth in young boys and tried to hide the problem from public view.
The company paid $2.2 billion to the DOJ in 2013 to end a federal criminal investigation into fraudulent marketing of Risperdal.
In a 2015 lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, a jury awarded $2.5 million to Austin Pledger of Alabama whose breasts grew as a result of Risperdal to size 46DD. His story was featured in People magazine.
In 2016, a jury awarded plaintiff Andrew Yount of Tennessee what was then a record $70 million. Yount’s jury was the first to hear evidence that J&J arranged for an article about Risperdal in a medical journal that omitted the problem of breast growth in boys. When questions were raised about the article, evidence showed the company tried to cover its tracks.
Trial judge Paula Patrick urged the Superior Court of Pennsylvania to uphold the verdict and $70 million monetary award against Johnson & Johnson, finding the jury’s decisions were reasonable based on the evidence and Yount’s injuries.
In the latest verdict against J&J in October 2019, a jury awarded a single Risperdal victim $8 billion in punitive damages. Although the award was reduced by a judge without explanation to $6.8 million, the jury’s outrage at the company’s conduct was clear.
Vaginal Mesh
Johnson & Johnson in 2005 launched and aggressively marketed a plastic mesh vaginal implant that company executives knew could fail and cause internal pain for its female customers, according to the Guardian newspaper and a consortium of European and British investigative journalists.
“Internal emails between executives, shared with the Guardian, show staff at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) were concerned that the plastic material the mesh was made from had the potential to turn ‘hard as a rock’ and roll up like a ‘folded potato chip’ inside patients… In one exchange, staff discussed how ‘shrinkage of the mesh may lead to pain,’” the newspaper reported.
Vaginal mesh was marketed as an alternative treatment to surgery to treat organ prolapse.
Women around the world have complained of severe vaginal pain, inability to have sexual relations, sexual partners who have been injured by protruding bits of hard plastic, and incontinence.
More than 1,000 Australian women in November 2019 won a landmark class action lawsuit against J&J after describing their pain as “so bad she struggles to breathe,” “excruciating,” and like “there was a blade in her vagina,” the Guardian reported.
The court found J&J didn’t warn women about the “gravity of the risks” and rushed the mesh to market without adequate testing, according to Reuters. The court is still deciding how much J&J and its subsidiary Ethicon will pay to the more than 1,350 women who sued.
“The risks were known, not insignificant and on Ethicon’s own admission, serious harm could ensue if they eventuated,” the judge said in her ruling, according to Reuters.
J&J sold vaginal mesh under the brand name Prolift for seven years until thousands of lawsuits and international investigations of vaginal mesh products by several manufacturers led J&J to pull the mesh from the market in 2012.
As of the end of 2019, there were 3,300 mesh lawsuits still pending against J&J, according to the company’s annual report.
Hip Implants
Johnson & Johnson is responsible for what the British Medical Journal called “one of the biggest disasters in orthopaedic history.”
In 2005, the company, through its DePuy orthopedic division, began selling a new metal-on-metal hip replacement system called the ASL-XR. The new hip made of metal balls and metal sockets was promoted as a technological advancement over plastic joints which could wear out over time.
Within a few years, surgeons were finding an unusually high failure rate of the hip replacements and high levels of chromium and cobalt in patients’ blood from metal erosion. Upon surgically re-opening the patient, surgeons found a pus-like fluid and saw that muscle, bone and soft tissue had been destroyed.
Some patients also reported constant pain, disturbed sleep, mood swings, anxiety, hearing loss, vision trouble, and tinnitus, according to Consumer Reports magazine.
Still, the company kept marketing the device.
“DePuy used a range of techniques and arguments to try to assuage fears arising from the evidence,” according to the BMJ. “…(one U.K. surgeon) was even told by a DePuy sales representative that good sources had told them that an illegal chromium ship unloaded its cargo in the river Tees a couple of years earlier and that was the reason for the raised chromium and cobalt levels he was finding in patients’ blood. DePuy declined to comment on this allegation.”
Facing thousands of lawsuits and complaints, DePuy in 2010 recalled the ASL-XR after it had been implanted in almost 100,000 people worldwide. At the same time, the company promoted another prosthetic, the Pinnacle, as a replacement even though it had the same metal-on-metal design, according to Consumer Reports magazine.
In 2016, a federal jury in Texas jury ordered J&J to pay six patients $30 million in actual damages and $1 billion in punitive damages after finding that J&J knew the Pinnacle product was defective and failed to adequately warn the public about the risks, according to Bloomberg. A judge later reduced punitive damages by half.
In 2019, J&J reached settlements totaling $1 billion to settle almost all of the outstanding lawsuits over Pinnacle hip replacements, according to the L.A. Times.
At the end of 2019, there were 11,400 hip replacement lawsuits pending against J&J, according to the company’s annual report.
