Latest news with #NoMoreTears
Miami Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Singer, 27, Reveals How a Heavy Metal Icon Taught Him To Be a ‘Rock Star'
If you need advice on how to make it in rock and roll, there's no one better to ask than Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne, 76, became one of the voices synonymous with heavy metal in the 1970s as the singer of Black Sabbath, delivering classic songs like "Iron Man," "War Pigs," and "Paranoid." And after the band fired him, Osbourne refused to say die, launching a solo career that gave us "No More Tears," "Crazy Train," "Bark at the Moon," and "Mama, I'm Coming Home." And Ozzy isn't afraid to help out the younger generation of rockers, which is why he ended up in a Yungblud music video. Yungblud (Dominic Harrison) asked Kelly Osbourne to be in the video for "The Funeral," the lead single for his self-titled third album. "I've known her for years, I met her in a pub on the circuit, on a mad night out - but she couldn't be there as she was on tour," the 27-year-old rocker told Louder. "And she was, like, 'My mum and dad will come.'" Not only did Ozzy and Sharon Osbourneshow up (they run over Yungblud in a car during the video), but they hung out with the rocker afterwards. "And he was like, 'You remind me a lot of me: you're mad and you're crazy and just lead with your [explicative] spirit,'" said Yungblud. Though their music is different, Yungblud said that people compare him to Ozzy because they both have an "unfiltered" attitude. "If you can be completely truthful, people aren't going to get it, and then they're gonna get it." Yungblud then said what Ozzy said next "hit me like a ton of bricks." "He said, 'You don't want to live your life censoring it, or don't be a rock star'. [Ozzy] said, 'You get this opportunity because you are not afraid to say the things other people will be. So when you stop [explicative] doing that, you ain't a rock star anymore'." Ozzy passed down his knowledge because he's about to call it a career. On July 5, he will perform his last solo show before reuniting with Black Sabbath for the heavy metal pioneer's final performance. And don't be sad-Ozzy said he's ready to give up the "rock star lifestyle." Related: Legendary Singer Says He's Done With the 'Rock Star Lifestyle' Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Citizen
27-05-2025
- General
- The Citizen
Join the fight: Sterilise to save strays
No More Tears Animal Rescue will be hosting a mass sterilisation outreach campaign to help sterilise 20 animals in underprivileged areas, but they are appealing for the public's assistance. • Also read: Bella's comeback: Rescued bull terrier on the road to recovery 'In these underprivileged communities, many pet owners want to sterilise their animals, but they simply cannot afford the fees. This eventually leads to overpopulation, neglect and unnecessary suffering of the animal,' volunteer Clarisse Kruger stated. She added that by contributing to this campaign, residents can help prevent the rising number of litter, decrease the amount of strays in and around the town and improve the health of affected animals. To help the animal rescue achieve their goals, Clarisse explained they need a total of R16 000 to sterilise 15 dogs and five cats. She further mentioned that any funds in excess will go directly to helping the animals in their care. The community's support, whether through covering the cost of one animal or contributing any amount, will have a lasting impact on our community by addressing the root causes of overpopulation in a humane way,' she explained. She continued that residents who donate to the cause will receive a letter of appreciation as well as public acknowledgement on their social media pages, if the resident wants to. 'Most importantly, you will become part of a movement that creates a safe environment for animals in need. We cannot do this without the community. We are pleading with the community to consider making a difference. Every donation, no matter how big or how small, can change the lives of many animals,' Clarisse concluded. If anyone would like to inquire about the campaign, they can reach out to No More Tears on 084 433 7748, 064 682 5145, or 079 499 4439. Or residents can send an email to clarisse@ or info@ At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
USA Today
22-05-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Did Johnson & Johnson put profit over safety?
Did Johnson & Johnson put profit over safety? | The Excerpt On a special episode (first released on May 21, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: For generations of Americans, the Johnson & Johnson brand has been a beloved one, as quintessentially American as baseball and apple pie. Its baby shampoo 'no more tears' has been a fixture in bathrooms for decades, as has its iconic band aids and talcum power. But it's this last item, the talcum powder, that may prove to be a tipping point in destroying its hard-won 139-year-old reputation with consumers. Author and freelance investigative journalist Gardiner Harris joins us on The Excerpt to discuss his new book 'no more tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson,' which is on bookshelves now. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, May 21st, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. For generations of Americans the Johnson & Johnson brand has been a beloved one, as quintessentially American as baseball and apple pie. Its baby shampoo No More Tears has been a fixture in bathrooms, as has its iconic Band-Aids and talcum powder. But it's that last item, the talcum powder that may prove to be a tipping point in destroying its hard-won 139 year-old reputation with consumers. To find out why, we're now joined by author and freelance investigative journalist, Gardiner Harris, his new book, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson is on bookshelves now. Gardiner, thanks for joining me. Gardiner Harris: Thanks for having me, Dana. Dana Taylor: There are two products that immediately come to mind when I think of Johnson & Johnson. One inspired the title of your book, Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo, No More Tears. The other, the topic of your investigation, is J&J's Baby Powder. What are the risks associated with talcum powder, and can you share some of the evidence you uncovered that the company knew about those risks? Gardiner Harris: About talcum powder, the risks are clearly about its chronic contamination with asbestos. But I also want to make clear, Dana, that my book is not just about baby powder. It is about nine separate products. The products that I go through include Tylenol, that is the most widely used drug on the planet, and is far more dangerous than most people know. I also talk about Epo or Procrit, that most people know because Lance Armstrong used it to win seven tours to France, but actually ended up killing more than 500,000 Americans in the worst cancer drug disaster in American history. Also, Risperdal, an antipsychotic that is part of a disaster that's killed more than a million Americans. So through these various products, I point out that Johnson & Johnson has been responsible for contributing or causing more than 2 million American deaths over the last 50 odd years, and that's more deaths than have died in all of America's wars combined. It's an extraordinary toll from what has long been one of the most admired corporations in the world. And it is that contrast between what we think of Johnson & Johnson and how Johnson & Johnson has actually behaved. That is the focus of my book. And that I hope people can come away and find ways to protect themselves, not only against Johnson & Johnson, but against corruption writ large in American healthcare. Dana Taylor: So can you give us some of the evidence that you uncovered specifically as relates to baby powder? Gardiner Harris: Sure. So talc and asbestos are chemically identical. They have the same exact constituencies. And the only difference between the two, is a little bit of pressure and time as to whether those chemicals form into talc deposits or they form in asbestos deposits. And basically, what geologists will tell you is that you cannot have a talc deposit without a little bit of asbestos ribboned in the middle of it, and you can't have an asbestos deposit without some talc ribboned in there. And basically, Johnson & Johnson began to understand this problem in the 1950s and the 1960s. Now, in the fifties and sixties, these small contaminations, and these tests showed that up to three to 5% of baby powder was asbestos in the early years, but there was asbestos everywhere in American society during those years. There wasn't a boat, plane, house, car that didn't have asbestos in it and often pure asbestos. So it didn't seem like a big deal. But science began to discover in the 1960s and the 1970s that even microscopic quantities of asbestos could cause cancer, particularly a cancer of the lining of the lung, which is known as mesothelioma. The industry then rallied, came up with an asbestos testing standard that it sold to the FDA as safe. In fact, this testing standard would bless talcum powders as being asbestos free, even when they had up to 3% asbestos. And then FDA basically washed its hands of the issue. It didn't have the money to police cosmetics at the time or even now, and it didn't. And so Johnson & Johnson then tested its own products for decades repeatedly finding asbestos in Johnson's Baby Powder, but not telling anyone. And this started to get very, very dark, Dana, beginning in the 1980s as researchers around the world, the first one at Harvard, began doing epidemiological studies comparing the cancer rates of women who used talcum-based powders like Johnson's Baby Powder with women who didn't. And those studies began to show that women who used talcum-based baby powders suffered somewhere around 80% more cancers, usually ovarian cancer, than women who didn't. And Johnson & Johnson saw this research. Nearly all other companies that were using talcum powders got away from talcum powders and substituted in cornstarch. Johnson & Johnson stubbornly clung to this iconic product, and it is now paying the price. It has been sued over the last several years by 93,000 people, mostly women suffering ovarian cancer, who are blaming their illnesses, and in some cases the death of their loved ones, on their use of Johnson's Baby Powder. Dana Taylor: As you say, there are literally tens of thousands OF pending lawsuits against J&J. and while this J&J subsidiary is still in bankruptcy because of all the lawsuits, the company's been unable to reach a settlement that's acceptable to the courts. What's the big sticking point here? Gardiner Harris: So Johnson & Johnson wants to use the bankruptcy system to solve all of its baby powder liability, not only now, but ever in the future. The problem with ovarian cancer and asbestos is that it can take 30 years for asbestos to cause the changes that lead to cancer. So it's possible that Johnson & Johnson will be sued by tens of thousands of women annually every year for 30 years. And it's that that Johnson & Johnson wants to get out from under, and so try to use the bankruptcy system to do that. Three judges have now thrown out all three of Johnson & Johnson's bankruptcy claims. And so Johnson & Johnson is now being forced to fight each one of these claims individually in the usual court system. Dana Taylor: Gardiner, did you find that the people you approached for your book, doctors, former employees, were willing to speak to you on the record? What kind of risks did they face in coming forward? Gardiner Harris: Johnson & Johnson is the most litigious company arguably in American history. It has spent more than $35 billion on lawyers and litigation since 2011. It sues anyone at the drop of a hat. And so it also has this huge cavalcade of consultants in just about every major American medical center in the country. So it first tries to sweet talk you, and then if you are not amenable, it often sues. So the people I talked to universally were really afraid. I ended up getting grand jury records, which as you may know, Dana, are the last truly secret institutions in American society. So in those documents, I got access to hundreds and hundreds of Johnson & Johnson employees cell numbers. I called hundreds of them. I got many of them to talk to me, but only because I promised them again and again that I would keep their name secret. Dana Taylor: Tylenol, another Johnson & Johnson product became a target of product tampering in the 1980s. People died when someone successfully slipped cyanide into Tylenol bottles. The tampering crisis led to their creation of tamper-proof bottles still in use today. They're an important part of the Johnson & Johnson legacy. But your book takes aim at their response. Why? Gardiner Harris: There is a lot of evidence that Johnson & Johnson knew that the poisoning probably happened somewhere in their own distribution system, and that they kept that knowledge from not only the public, but investigators themselves. To this day, Dana, the Johnson & Johnson response in 1982 is considered the gold standard of corporate response to crises. And it's taught as among the first things that students at the Harvard Business School, Wharton School, all of them, learn. And the lessons that are taught to these students is if you're open, if you're honest, if you do the right thing, the public will reward you and you will be profitable. Those lessons are all wrong. It's fairly clear that Johnson & Johnson kept a lot of what it knew from the public and from investigators. So the real lessons that students at HBS, at Harvard and Wharton should be taught, is if you lie to the public, you might really get away with this, which is what Johnson & Johnson did, and what it has been doing for decades. Dana Taylor: Yours is a story about a beloved American brand. At its core, it's a story about the people behind the brand and the people affected by the brand. What compelled you to tell this story? Gardiner Harris: Dana, you and I are both reporters. I was a reporter at the highest levels of media, becoming a White House correspondent for the New York Times, but we fail the American public all too often. And I think the story of Johnson & Johnson is one of our greatest failures. It is essentially, a killer in our midst that we fail to warn the public about. Now, I tried a couple of times, but this is a very difficult story to tell. It's a complicated story. It needed a book to show its sweep. And I felt like it was partly my responsibility that this company had been allowed to behave so badly for so long without anyone knowing about it. Because I was one of the top drug reporters in the country, and so I left daily journalism to write this book, and it took me basically six years to get it done. Dana Taylor: And finally, your book was released last month. How has J&J responded? Gardiner Harris: So far, crickets. Haven't heard from them, which is not at all unusual. I covered the company at the Wall Street Journal, at the New York Times. For tough stories, Johnson & Johnson has historically refused to participate in any of these stories. And I actually tell story after story in the book about Johnson & Johnson managing to kill some very critical stories over the course of its history, by calling up headquarters of these big media conglomerates. And because Johnson & Johnson was one of the largest advertisers in the world, was able to threaten these organizations, "If you run this piece, we will pull all of our ads." And again and again, that succeeded in having critical stories about the company killed. So the company has been very successful by these backdoor mechanisms of keeping its brand pristine. That has not happened in this case. They have not responded, and I don't really expect them ever to. Dana Taylor: We reached out to Johnson & Johnson for comment on Harris's investigation, and they issued a statement saying, "We stand by the safety of our products and are focused on what we do best, delivering medical innovation for patients around the world." Investigative journalist, Gardiner Harris's new book is called No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, and it's on bookshelves now. Gardiner, thanks for being on The Excerpt. Gardiner Harris: I'm thrilled to be here, and thanks for inviting me. Dana Taylor: Thanks to our Senior Producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our Executive Producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcast@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How Johnson & Johnson Misled America
In February, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the senior-most health-care official in the United States, many Americans were appalled. Kennedy has a long and lucrative history of promoting theories that are both unfounded (cellphones and Wi-Fi cause cancer) and dangerous (vaccines cause autism). If you're seeking explanations for the popularity of Kennedy and the so-called health-freedom movement, it might be tempting to turn to individual rather than systemic culprits: online influencers spreading conspiracies, politicians exploiting public anxiety, tech bosses engineering outrage and radicalization, grifters pushing pseudo-scientific miracle cures. Some of these forces have likely helped Kennedy ascend to the top of the Department of Health and Human Services. But to attribute the mainstreaming of previously fringe beliefs solely to such people is incomplete. It promotes the comforting conclusion that Kennedy fans were simply duped and manipulated, and dismisses a possibility with more unsettling implications: that the status quo of health care in America left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else. [Read: The MAHA takeover is complete] As of 2023, health care makes up about 18 percent of U.S. GDP and accounts for roughly a quarter of all government spending—far more than in other similarly wealthy countries, but with generally inferior outcomes on most measures. Health-care companies have benefited from this state of affairs. Prominent among them is Johnson & Johnson, the approximately $370 billion institution that the investigative journalist Gardiner Harris describes in his meticulously reported new book, No More Tears, as 'American healthcare's central player, a colossus standing astride every part' of the industry. More than 135 years old, J&J has been trusted by millions who have used its skin-care products, relied on its over-the-counter remedies, and taken its medications for pain relief. The company manufactures a wide range of drugs and devices, including for cancer treatment and—at least for a time—COVID-19. (The last doses of J&J's COVID vaccine were pulled after they were found to increase the risk of blood clots in a very small percentage of users.) The company was long heralded for its ethics, thanks in part to its 1982 decision to recall every bottle of Tylenol from store shelves in order to restock them with new tamper-proof containers, following the deaths of seven people who'd taken Tylenol that had been poisoned with cyanide. In its own telling, the company is guided by its 'credo,' a mission statement that 'challenges us to put the needs and well-being of the people we serve first.' For generations, J&J was best known for Johnson's Baby Powder, a product that the company promoted as a symbol of its trustworthiness. 'The association of the Johnson's name with both the mother infant bond and mother's touch as she uses the baby products is known as Johnson & Johnson's Golden Egg,' a 2008 company presentation asserted. 'This association is one of the company's most precious assets.' In No More Tears, Harris argues that the 'halo' from this 'Golden Egg' helped obscure a different side of Johnson & Johnson: a sprawling conglomerate that has acted brazenly, sometimes even illegally, in the pursuit of profit. In 2018, Reuters reported that J&J had known since at least 1957 that the talc in its baby powder contained asbestos. (The company denied the claim in full-page newspaper ads and on social media, tweeting, 'The FDA has tested Johnson's talc since the '70s. Every single time it did not contain asbestos.') Harris, who was previously a public-health and pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, cites a 1969 research paper on asbestos that found that 'it is difficult to conceive of a better way of having fibers inhaled than the use of cosmetic talcum powders.' By that point, scientists had proved that asbestos could cause cancer. Rather than altering the formula of its baby powder, however, in the early 1970s, J&J and other members of an industry trade group developed a new test that was incapable of detecting trace amounts of tremolite asbestos—a version of the toxin that is particularly carcinogenic even in very small quantities—and did not even look for another type, chrysotile asbestos. Despite these shortcomings, the new test created the illusion of scientific credibility, allowing companies to plausibly claim that their products had been tested for asbestos. By the late '70s, Harris writes, the FDA (which was also using inadequate tests) was 'satisfied that the industry had finally and fully dealt with its asbestos problem.' In the decades following, reams of research and billions of dollars' worth of court judgments found that Johnson's Baby Powder still contained asbestos. Tens of thousands of people have sued J&J, alleging that the company's talcum powder caused their mesothelioma or ovarian cancer. (Some juries have dismissed these claims, while others have not reached verdicts.) In a 2022 statement, the company asserted, 'We continue to stand behind the safety of Johnson's Baby Powder, which is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer.' In 2023, the company stopped selling talc-based powder worldwide. The story of Johnson's Baby Powder is one of nine case studies in No More Tears that follow a similar pattern: J&J developed medical devices, drugs, or other consumer products. It marketed them aggressively, sometimes despite knowing that they were ineffective or possibly harmful (and, in certain cases, for uses that were never approved by the FDA). Then, Harris writes, the company disputed or suppressed inconvenient findings, pushed misleading narratives, and, when necessary, spent large sums defending itself in court. Consider the drug Procrit, J&J's synthetic brand of the protein erythropoietin (EPO), which is designed to increase the volume of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in the body. EPO was originally developed for kidney-dialysis patients; however, in the late '80s, the company began pushing Procrit for cancer patients weakened by their treatment, even as early research suggested that EPO might make heart attacks more likely and tumors more aggressive. In 1996, an ongoing trial on dialysis patients of another brand of EPO, by the pharmaceutical company Amgen, was stopped 'because patients receiving more EPO were dying in far greater numbers than those who got lower doses,' Harris writes. Meanwhile, J&J was running a large-scale advertising campaign for Procrit, and sales were booming. In 2001, J&J began another trial of Procrit before terminating it prematurely when it found that patients who took it developed more blood clots than expected. Over the next few years, the company started and stopped at least five additional EPO studies for the same reason. Despite the widespread evidence of very limited effectiveness and the risks of EPO drugs—even among many of the dialysis patients for whom they were originally intended—Procrit remains on the market today. Harris draws a parallel to the opioid crisis, in which regulators and pharmaceutical companies waited years before beginning to crack down on the sale of opioid-based painkillers. Johnson & Johnson has also played a part in the opioid epidemic. Five years before Purdue Pharma received FDA approval to begin selling OxyContin, an oxycodone pill that Purdue claimed was less prone to abuse, J&J received the agency's sign-off on its own opioid-based painkiller. Duragesic was a fentanyl patch that was initially given primarily to cancer patients who struggled with swallowing—a relatively limited market. As Harris writes, doctors already knew that opioids were highly addictive; few of them 'were willing to prescribe them in anything but the most extreme circumstances.' Harris reports that J&J deployed aggressive sales tactics and offered knowingly false assurances that Duragesic was less likely to be abused than other opioids. In fact, he notes, J&J had been making these arguments to doctors for years, even before Purdue began selling OxyContin, 'laying the groundwork' for the epidemic that followed. As Purdue began attracting national scrutiny in the early 2000s when the scale of the opioid crisis was emerging, J&J watched Duragesic sales surge. Harris attributes this growth in part to the fact that Purdue and OxyContin attracted much of the public's outrage and fear, which helped J&J sell its own drug. [Read: Imagine a drug that feels like Tylenol and works like OxyContin] 'I believe Johnson & Johnson was a major cause of our opioid crisis,' Andrew Kolodny, an opioid expert at Brandeis University, testified in an ultimately unsuccessful 2019 lawsuit filed by Oklahoma's attorney general. (In a separate action by a coalition of state attorneys general, J&J agreed, along with three pharmaceutical distributors, to pay a settlement of $26 billion.) Owing in part to the fact that J&J actually owned poppy fields that grew the opiate, which the company used in its products and also sold to other manufacturers, including Purdue, Kolodny called J&J 'the kingpin in our opioid crisis.' J&J has had few better friends than its regulator: the FDA. Harris's condemnation of the agency is relentless; he details the ways he believes it's been captured by the industry it should be overseeing. In 1992, Congress passed a law shifting a large portion of the agency's funding source from taxpayers to health-care companies, leaving the FDA, as Harris puts it, 'financially dependent on the drug industry.' In 2011, J&J swooped in to coordinate new industry funding for the FDA, which preserved hundreds of agency jobs. Meanwhile, the revolving door between regulators and the companies they are supposed to monitor spins freely under both Democratic and Republican administrations. A similarly searing critique of the FDA echoes throughout another recent book. The science journalist Charles Piller's Doctored details the yearslong dominance of a strain of Alzheimer's research that has turned out to be less promising than its reputation would suggest. The 'amyloid cascade hypothesis,' so named in a landmark 1992 paper published in Science, proposes that the accumulation in the brain of a protein called amyloid-beta causes Alzheimer's disease. For decades, the majority of Alzheimer's research has centered on this hypothesis, Piller writes, drawing billions of dollars in funding, enrolling thousands of patients in amyloid-related drug trials, and preventing other theories from gaining traction. It turns out, however, that some of the foundational research linking amyloid buildup to Alzheimer's relies on possibly fraudulent work. A central thread of Doctored is the story of Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who in 2021 began collecting indications that the research supporting simufilam, a new Alzheimer's drug developed by the biotech start-up Cassava Sciences, was based in part on manipulated images. Schrag's work helped spark a chain of events that led to the termination of the drug's clinical trials last November. But his discovery also drove him to look more closely at other Alzheimer's research. Eventually, he and other researchers found hundreds of studies—including many that have served as the basis for human clinical trials—that appear to include images or data that were, as the book's title suggests, allegedly doctored by researchers. These studies have been cited tens of thousands of times in scientific papers. (Two researchers who Piller says manipulated images settled a suit with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year without admitting or denying guilt. They did not respond to requests for comment from Piller for his book.) Despite these revelations, the larger amyloid hypothesis has not been discredited. Although there seems to be a link between amyloid proteins and Alzheimer's, whether the relationship is causal or correlational isn't clear. Amyloid-related treatments have been effective at moderately slowing the progression of the disease in some early-stage Alzheimer's patients, but Doctored makes a strong argument that scientists, universities, patient groups, and pharmaceutical companies have advocated for this treatment beyond what the evidence merits, and instead of exploring other promising avenues. (Last year, the FDA approved a new anti-amyloid drug called Kisunla.) Piller's investigation vividly captures the risks borne by whistleblowers like Schrag, not just for calling out apparent fraud but also for challenging conventional wisdom. Yet in an era of rising distrust in experts, Schrag and his fellow scientists face a broader conundrum. In Doctored, Piller considers whether overly publicizing scientific misconduct without offering solutions 'creates a risk of people throwing up their hands and thinking 'the whole scientific enterprise is a cesspool of corruption,'' as a friend worries to him. The risk of adding fodder to public cynicism is a real concern. But is it possible to restore trust in science and public health without first accepting that, in many cases, that trust has been lost for understandable reasons? To witness how Johnson & Johnson has pushed expensive and sometimes dangerous products is to understand why people might feel so betrayed by the health-care establishment that they'd roll the dice on a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist. To discover that billions of dollars in Alzheimer's funding, and numerous clinical trials that recruited vulnerable human beings and their families, could have been based on fraudulent research is to see that Americans are right to be angry. Long before Donald Trump and DOGE and RFK Jr. came for scientists and health-care workers, too much of their work was already being undermined by a system that prioritized profit over care. Together, Doctored and No More Tears offer a sweeping indictment of the status quo. Neither the actions of companies such as Johnson & Johnson nor their influence over regulators and politicians created a movement like 'Make America healthy again.' But they helped create space for it. In their relentless pursuit of profit, they helped break the faith that held dangerous alternatives at bay. The journey to undo the damage and restore trust is a difficult and uncertain one. A good starting point might be to consider why people are so angry and distrustful, rather than blaming them for losing faith in a system that has made money off their pain for far too long. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
21-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
How Big Pharma Paved the Way for MAHA
In February, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the senior-most health-care official in the United States, many Americans were appalled. Kennedy has a long and lucrative history of promoting theories that are both unfounded (cellphones and Wi-Fi cause cancer) and dangerous (vaccines cause autism). If you're seeking explanations for the popularity of Kennedy and the so-called health-freedom movement, it might be tempting to turn to individual rather than systemic culprits: online influencers spreading conspiracies, politicians exploiting public anxiety, tech bosses engineering outrage and radicalization, grifters pushing pseudo-scientific miracle cures. Some of these forces have likely helped Kennedy ascend to the top of the Department of Health and Human Services. But to attribute the mainstreaming of previously fringe beliefs solely to such people is incomplete. It promotes the comforting conclusion that Kennedy fans were simply duped and manipulated, and dismisses a possibility with more unsettling implications: that the status quo of health care in America left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else. As of 2023, health care makes up about 18 percent of U.S. GDP and accounts for roughly a quarter of all government spending—far more than in other similarly wealthy countries, but with generally inferior outcomes on most measures. Health-care companies have benefited from this state of affairs. Prominent among them is Johnson & Johnson, the approximately $370 billion institution that the investigative journalist Gardiner Harris describes in his meticulously reported new book, No More Tears, as 'American healthcare's central player, a colossus standing astride every part' of the industry. More than 135 years old, J&J has been trusted by millions who have used its skin-care products, relied on its over-the-counter remedies, and taken its medications for pain relief. The company manufactures a wide range of drugs and devices, including for cancer treatment and—at least for a time—COVID-19. (The last doses of J&J's COVID vaccine were pulled after they were found to increase the risk of blood clots in a very small percentage of users.) The company was long heralded for its ethics, thanks in part to its 1982 decision to recall every bottle of Tylenol from store shelves in order to restock them with new tamper-proof containers, following the deaths of seven people who'd taken Tylenol that had been poisoned with cyanide. In its own telling, the company is guided by its ' credo,' a mission statement that 'challenges us to put the needs and well-being of the people we serve first.' For generations, J&J was best known for Johnson's Baby Powder, a product that the company promoted as a symbol of its trustworthiness. 'The association of the Johnson's name with both the mother infant bond and mother's touch as she uses the baby products is known as Johnson & Johnson's Golden Egg,' a 2008 company presentation asserted. 'This association is one of the company's most precious assets.' In No More Tears, Harris argues that the 'halo' from this 'Golden Egg' helped obscure a different side of Johnson & Johnson: a sprawling conglomerate that has acted brazenly, sometimes even illegally, in the pursuit of profit. In 2018, Reuters reported that J&J had known since at least 1957 that the talc in its baby powder contained asbestos. (The company denied the claim in full-page newspaper ads and on social media, tweeting, 'The FDA has tested Johnson's talc since the '70s. Every single time it did not contain asbestos.') Harris, who was previously a public-health and pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, cites a 1969 research paper on asbestos that found that 'it is difficult to conceive of a better way of having fibers inhaled than the use of cosmetic talcum powders.' By that point, scientists had proved that asbestos could cause cancer. Rather than altering the formula of its baby powder, however, in the early 1970s, J&J and other members of an industry trade group developed a new test that was incapable of detecting trace amounts of tremolite asbestos—a version of the toxin that is particularly carcinogenic even in very small quantities—and did not even look for another type, chrysotile asbestos. Despite these shortcomings, the new test created the illusion of scientific credibility, allowing companies to plausibly claim that their products had been tested for asbestos. By the late '70s, Harris writes, the FDA (which was also using inadequate tests) was 'satisfied that the industry had finally and fully dealt with its asbestos problem.' In the decades following, reams of research and billions of dollars' worth of court judgments found that Johnson's Baby Powder still contained asbestos. Tens of thousands of people have sued J&J, alleging that the company's talcum powder caused their mesothelioma or ovarian cancer. (Some juries have dismissed these claims, while others have not reached verdicts.) In a 2022 statement, the company asserted, 'We continue to stand behind the safety of Johnson's Baby Powder, which is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer.' In 2023, the company stopped selling talc-based powder worldwide. The story of Johnson's Baby Powder is one of nine case studies in No More Tears that follow a similar pattern: J&J developed medical devices, drugs, or other consumer products. It marketed them aggressively, sometimes despite knowing that they were ineffective or possibly harmful (and, in certain cases, for uses that were never approved by the FDA). Then, Harris writes, the company disputed or suppressed inconvenient findings, pushed misleading narratives, and, when necessary, spent large sums defending itself in court. Consider the drug Procrit, J&J's synthetic brand of the protein erythropoietin (EPO), which is designed to increase the volume of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in the body. EPO was originally developed for kidney-dialysis patients; however, in the late '80s, the company began pushing Procrit for cancer patients weakened by their treatment, even as early research suggested that EPO might make heart attacks more likely and tumors more aggressive. In 1996, an ongoing trial on dialysis patients of another brand of EPO, by the pharmaceutical company Amgen, was stopped 'because patients receiving more EPO were dying in far greater numbers than those who got lower doses,' Harris writes. Meanwhile, J&J was running a large-scale advertising campaign for Procrit, and sales were booming. In 2001, J&J began another trial of Procrit before terminating it prematurely when it found that patients who took it developed more blood clots than expected. Over the next few years, the company started and stopped at least five additional EPO studies for the same reason. Despite the widespread evidence of very limited effectiveness and the risks of EPO drugs—even among many of the dialysis patients for whom they were originally intended—Procrit remains on the market today. Harris draws a parallel to the opioid crisis, in which regulators and pharmaceutical companies waited years before beginning to crack down on the sale of opioid-based painkillers. Johnson & Johnson has also played a part in the opioid epidemic. Five years before Purdue Pharma received FDA approval to begin selling OxyContin, an oxycodone pill that Purdue claimed was less prone to abuse, J&J received the agency's sign-off on its own opioid-based painkiller. Duragesic was a fentanyl patch that was initially given primarily to cancer patients who struggled with swallowing—a relatively limited market. As Harris writes, doctors already knew that opioids were highly addictive; few of them 'were willing to prescribe them in anything but the most extreme circumstances.' Harris reports that J&J deployed aggressive sales tactics and offered knowingly false assurances that Duragesic was less likely to be abused than other opioids. In fact, he notes, J&J had been making these arguments to doctors for years, even before Purdue began selling OxyContin, 'laying the groundwork' for the epidemic that followed. As Purdue began attracting national scrutiny in the early 2000s when the scale of the opioid crisis was emerging, J&J watched Duragesic sales surge. Harris attributes this growth in part to the fact that Purdue and OxyContin attracted much of the public's outrage and fear, which helped J&J sell its own drug. 'I believe Johnson & Johnson was a major cause of our opioid crisis,' Andrew Kolodny, an opioid expert at Brandeis University, testified in an ultimately unsuccessful 2019 lawsuit filed by Oklahoma's attorney general. (In a separate action by a coalition of state attorneys general, J&J agreed, along with three pharmaceutical distributors, to pay a settlement of $26 billion.) Owing in part to the fact that J&J actually owned poppy fields that grew the opiate, which the company used in its products and also sold to other manufacturers, including Purdue, Kolodny called J&J 'the kingpin in our opioid crisis.' J&J has had few better friends than its regulator: the FDA. Harris's condemnation of the agency is relentless; he details the ways he believes it's been captured by the industry it should be overseeing. In 1992, Congress passed a law shifting a large portion of the agency's funding source from taxpayers to health-care companies, leaving the FDA, as Harris puts it, 'financially dependent on the drug industry.' In 2011, J&J swooped in to coordinate new industry funding for the FDA, which preserved hundreds of agency jobs. Meanwhile, the revolving door between regulators and the companies they are supposed to monitor spins freely under both Democratic and Republican administrations. A similarly searing critique of the FDA echoes throughout another recent book. The science journalist Charles Piller's Doctored details the yearslong dominance of a strain of Alzheimer's research that has turned out to be less promising than its reputation would suggest. The 'amyloid cascade hypothesis,' so named in a landmark 1992 paper published in Science, proposes that the accumulation in the brain of a protein called amyloid-beta causes Alzheimer's disease. For decades, the majority of Alzheimer's research has centered on this hypothesis, Piller writes, drawing billions of dollars in funding, enrolling thousands of patients in amyloid-related drug trials, and preventing other theories from gaining traction. It turns out, however, that some of the foundational research linking amyloid buildup to Alzheimer's relies on possibly fraudulent work. A central thread of Doctored is the story of Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University neuroscientist who in 2021 began collecting indications that the research supporting simufilam, a new Alzheimer's drug developed by the biotech start-up Cassava Sciences, was based in part on manipulated images. Schrag's work helped spark a chain of events that led to the termination of the drug's clinical trials last November. But his discovery also drove him to look more closely at other Alzheimer's research. Eventually, he and other researchers found hundreds of studies—including many that have served as the basis for human clinical trials—that appear to include images or data that were, as the book's title suggests, allegedly doctored by researchers. These studies have been cited tens of thousands of times in scientific papers. (Two researchers who Piller says manipulated images settled a suit with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year without admitting or denying guilt. They did not respond to requests for comment from Piller for his book.) Despite these revelations, the larger amyloid hypothesis has not been discredited. Although there seems to be a link between amyloid proteins and Alzheimer's, whether the relationship is causal or correlational isn't clear. Amyloid-related treatments have been effective at moderately slowing the progression of the disease in some early-stage Alzheimer's patients, but Doctored makes a strong argument that scientists, universities, patient groups, and pharmaceutical companies have advocated for this treatment beyond what the evidence merits, and instead of exploring other promising avenues. (Last year, the FDA approved a new anti-amyloid drug called Kisunla.) Piller's investigation vividly captures the risks borne by whistleblowers like Schrag, not just for calling out apparent fraud but also for challenging conventional wisdom. Yet in an era of rising distrust in experts, Schrag and his fellow scientists face a broader conundrum. In Doctored, Piller considers whether overly publicizing scientific misconduct without offering solutions 'creates a risk of people throwing up their hands and thinking 'the whole scientific enterprise is a cesspool of corruption,'' as a friend worries to him. The risk of adding fodder to public cynicism is a real concern. But is it possible to restore trust in science and public health without first accepting that, in many cases, that trust has been lost for understandable reasons? To witness how Johnson & Johnson has pushed expensive and sometimes dangerous products is to understand why people might feel so betrayed by the health-care establishment that they'd roll the dice on a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist. To discover that billions of dollars in Alzheimer's funding, and numerous clinical trials that recruited vulnerable human beings and their families, could have been based on fraudulent research is to see that Americans are right to be angry. Long before Donald Trump and DOGE and RFK Jr. came for scientists and health-care workers, too much of their work was already being undermined by a system that prioritized profit over care. Together, Doctored and No More Tears offer a sweeping indictment of the status quo. Neither the actions of companies such as Johnson & Johnson nor their influence over regulators and politicians created a movement like ' Make America healthy again.' But they helped create space for it. In their relentless pursuit of profit, they helped break the faith that held dangerous alternatives at bay. The journey to undo the damage and restore trust is a difficult and uncertain one. A good starting point might be to consider why people are so angry and distrustful, rather than blaming them for losing faith in a system that has made money off their pain for far too long.
