The Texas two-step, as it's called.
> In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management under a strategy called the “Texas two-step.” That legal but controversial approach allows a solvent parent company to protect its assets by creating a subsidiary to hold its liabilities — and then having the new company declare bankruptcy, as LTL did just days after incorporating. Critics complain it’s an abuse of the bankruptcy system and allows companies facing massive litigation to dodge corporate responsibility.
> The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia dismissed the bankruptcy filing in January, finding LTL was not in financial distress and had “no valid bankruptcy purpose.”
> But hours after that case was formally dismissed in April, LTL filed for bankruptcy protection again, this time with a higher settlement proposal of $8.9 billion.
The fact that this is legal is such a mockery of consumer protection law.
It was not avoiding liability at all.
The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early.
Some key quote from Levine:
> Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and they tend to award enormous damages in cases like that. You multiply enormous damages by lots of cases, and you can easily end up with damages that exceed the value of the company. This can lead to unfair results, not for you — who cares about you — but for your victims: If a $1 billion company has killed 100 people, the first 10 who sue might get $100 million each of damages, leaving nothing for the remaining 90.
> one pretty practical approach [to how to solve this problem] is bankruptcy. This, after all, is what bankruptcy is for: It is a system to make sure that creditors are all paid fairly out of the assets of a company, rather than paying some creditors a lot because they are early and others nothing because they are too late.
> Bankruptcy courts are run by judges, who are bankruptcy professionals and who are used to dealing with companies that are, you know, bankrupt. They are used to not having enough money to go around; they are not temperamentally lavish with claims.
> That is, LTL — the box where J&J put its talc claims — could draw at least $61.5 billion from J&J to pay off those claims. The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims.
> But the Third Circuit disagreed, not because it thinks that the bankruptcy court is a bad place to resolve claims, and not because it thinks that J&J is avoiding liability with the Texas two-step, but because LTL isn’t bankrupt enough
> In some ways this is a sensible reading of the bankruptcy code, but it is a little bit of a weird result. The point of doing any of this is to do it early, before you are out of money, so that you have plenty of money to pay all the claimants fairly. The court realizes this awkwardness
> You don’t have to be insolvent to file for bankruptcy, and it is good to file early, but not prematurely. You want to file for bankruptcy while you still have plenty of money to pay claims, but not too much money.
Read the whole article. It's good!
I'm entirely unconvinced that J&J couldn't pay back everything they owe, to everyone they owe it to, without bankruptcy and the fact that they were able to avoid all of those individual lawsuits is already J&J getting off the hook unfairly and avoiding their full liability.
If I'm wrong about that and without bankruptcy J&J would be forced to go out of business before everyone could get paid, then no matter if they use bankruptcy or not, the end result of that bankruptcy should still mean that every penny they have goes to their victims and the families of their victims (evenly distributed or whatever) until J&J actually does go out of business.
If J&J in, any form, survives because of this “Texas two-step" then the “Texas two-step" is an insult to victims and to justice and should be outlawed.
Perhaps bankruptcy is a great way to divide up whatever is owed to everyone, but as long as J&J continues to exist it means that they got off the hook. Honestly, many of J&J's serial killers and mass poisoners should be locked up for the rest of their lives. Murder was extremely profitable for them. They'll do it again if they have the opportunity.
The amount that can be awarded by a jury is uncapped, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether J&J could pay all claimants.
How much is this? I thought we don't know yet since so much is still under litigation.
There is a valid point there, but one could argue it sets up unfair precedent for companies to act in bad faith if they can get off easy.
The point of limited liability is so that grandpa can invest in an index fund even if he doesn't understand the inner workings of consumer products manufacturing without having to worry that one of the 500 companies in the index will hire a bad manager and have it wipe out not just that investment but his entire retirement account and his house and every other asset.
The problem comes when corporations use the same mechanism to isolate their subsidiaries. Foo Corp is making phones that burn down your house and providing financing to buy them with and cloud services to use them with and software to run on them, but these are each different subsidiaries. Then Foo Electronics files for bankruptcy while its shareholders get to keep all the profits it made from selling the other services instead of making the victims whole.
The solution should be that limited liability is for natural persons, not corporations. If a corporation screws up you can go after the parent. Which makes sense, because the original rationale for limited liability doesn't apply there. We don't expect a business to be a generic investment fund -- if they're buying something it's because it complements their existing products and services, and they understand its operations. If they were just buying it as an independent investment then they could just as well return the money to shareholders to invest in that themselves.
And if that also makes it less advantageous for corporations to consolidate into huge conglomerates, good.
That's despicable.
And yet as soon as it was dismissed, within hours J&J had refiled with different numbers.
The court also said that trying to tie this new entity to North Carolina was also trying to maximize a "strained and very limited" connection to the state, and the administrator questioned why this entity had no relationship to the state of New Jersey, where J&J is headquartered and does business out of.
The court far from signed off on J&J's process.
That's a legit argument in favor of bankruptcy of the entire company! There's no good justification for creating a shell company to control the damages on the main company (who did kill people).
$65BN is almost exactly equal to one year's gross profits for the company, on top of which J&J has $24BN in cash and a market valuation of over $400BN.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JNJ/key-statistics/
That $65BN is likely decades worth of claims, not one lump sum being demanded at once. Assuming the claims are spread out over just one decade, the settlement costs would amount to around 10% of their gross profits. Over multiple decades, it starts approaching "rounding error on the balance sheet."
Framing this as "J&J might run out of money to pay people for this" is pretty disingenuous to the point of feeling like corporate apologism.
Johnson & Johnson net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $12.724B, a 35.83% decline year-over-year. Johnson & Johnson annual net income for 2022 was $17.941B, a 14.07% decline from 2021. Johnson & Johnson annual net income for 2021 was $20.878B, a 41.89% increase from 2020.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JNJ/johnson-johnso...
The term for this process is misleading, and the mental image is very much of a company which is getting out of paying their victims. In this case, filing for bankruptcy created fairness among victims, they did not have to be first or fifth to get the right damages, every victim was treated equal.
> That is, LTL — the box where J&J put its talc claims — could draw at least $61.5 billion from J&J to pay off those claims. The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims. The point, rather, was to deal with those claims in an organized and efficient way, to treat all the claimants fairly.
The only reason the court quashed it was because it wanted J&J to fight the individual or class action lawsuits, and it was too early for bankruptcy.
When a serial killer gets the electric chair, most people consider that a fair punishment. No? So tell me, if a judge wanted to apply capital punishment to a company, which is not even a living thing, it's just money and stamped papers. How could it do that, when the company can use this scheme to escape?
> The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims.
Imagine if the criminal justice system worked like that.
> the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims.
BS. So much stinking BS. This is even contradicted by your own quotes.
>> they are not temperamentally lavish with claims.
Which is just admitting that bankrupty courts are likely to awards lower judgements than the juries and judges who would otherwise be awarding damages. That is pretty clearly reducing liability.
If J&J eas really about to run out of money to pay out liabilities due lawsuits and we need to split what money they do have fairly, then J&J itself should declare bankruptcy. What they are doing instead is a sham legal maneuver designed to reduce judgements sizes and remove the legal rights of their victims.
Trying to couch that as "protecting the victims" is a farce. I wonder how much Matt got paid...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/jjs-ltl-units-bankruptcy-dismi...
Because the bankrupcy basically pauses all litigation (including against the parent company) it means even more delays on an already extremely lengthy process, but the restrictions of bankrupcy only apply to the spin-out, not the parent. So while in theory they may pay out eventually, the process can easily take more time and money than many of the claimants have (literally in the case of those who have cancer).
In general the immense amount of time most court systems take to actually resolve disputes like this is a big contributer to the lack of faith most people have in them, and the capacity to stall for time available to both parties but especially defendents is a big part of that problem.
This "just" is sure doing a lot of work.
First off, if J&J is really on the hook for all the liabilities of the child company, then the child company is not bankrupt since it has plenty of money to pay unless J&J is also bankrupt. This makes it pretty clear that the bankruptcy is a sham legal maneuver.
Second, it is a bit rich that this legal maneuver is framed at "protecting claimants" when it blocks those claimants from pursuing cases that maximizes their damages. It seems pretty clear that J&J are not following this strategy to protect the victims an ensure fairness but to minimize their own costs and damages.
What this basically amounts to is subverting bankruptcy law to force claimants into something more akin to a class action without the consent of the claimants.
If it really is the case that total awarded damages exceed what J&J can pay, then J&J should itself file for bankruptcy.
This is purposefully obtuse. If a few courts award 5 plaintiffs the entire pot of gold, then there's nothing left for all the other claimants. And of course it's in J&J's interest to consolidate the cases. It's also in the plaintiffs' interests, especially those who weren't first.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-l...
The idea here was that a bankruptcy judge could more fairly distribute $61.5 billion dollars among claimants than having them sue J&J one at a time and getting uneven awards and costing everyone more lawyer hours.
Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this? Shouldn't they be disbanded, their assets sold, and new businesses allowed to exist in that space?
What are we, in total, as a society, gaining by allowing this?
The issue is that there might be multiple actions, and compensation might be used up byt the first one (eg, if the company was sent into bankruptcy by the first class action, then subsequent cases would be useless). This is a pretty reasonable argument IMHO.
> Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this?
This seems fairly debatable.
J&J produces a lot of things that aren't talc, and it isn't like they are a cigarette company that knew the health risks. The risks from talc weren't known are are still debated, and it is a thing that has been used for thousands of years without known issues.
Separately there's a good argument that keeping the company alive is better for those affected because it can fun ongoing liabilities.
The Texas Two-Step isn't a concept borne from bankruptcy courts.
Would that it were so.
You talk about charitability, but here's a question for Matt, you and others:
"Is this strategy called the Texas Two-Step because:
1) it assists claimants and plaintiffs (your adversaries) to bond together and present one solid unified case against you, or...
2) because it assists you to elegantly dance around your liabilities?"
Bankruptcy law is hundreds of years old and is designed to protect creditors actually. That’s why there is a separate court to handle things and involved independent outsiders and judges that oversee things. It works and is used every time there is a financial crisis and thousands of times per day at the individual level.
This sort of thing is specifically prevented and handled by a principle called fraudulent conveyance. This principle causes the court to look back in time to what the assets and liabilities were closer to the time of the start of the financial difficulties of the debtor.
Not sure why you are treating it as an absurd concept.
Must be nice, being able to say "Well, we'll give LTL $X and that can be used for settlements" while still throwing off nearly $X a year in profits, and 25% of X in shareholder dividends alone.
Why should a company be allowed to set and determine how much liability it needs to pay?
There's nothing wrong with it being legal to shuffle assets among subsidiaries, as long as the veil is trivial to pierce when needed.
The rich get richer.
Reasons include, but are not limited to:
a) compounding
b) the right to bequeath your assets to your children
c) if you're financially savvy you're more likely to educate your children about long-term wealth
d) uneven effects of monetary policy (e.g. interest rates)
etc.
I hope this is not as bad in medicine and health related research. But just thinking that some paper can be used against you in court to claim billions of dollars in damages makes me uneasy. Peer reviewed paper != science. Peer review is a crude filter on research that can both accept bad work and reject good work. There must be a higher bar for something that can be used in the court of law. Some sort of scientific consensus must be needed at least.
It's easy to dismiss this because screw J&J. But I think we are all paying for these lawsuits through our insurances and taxes and higher drug prices.
Not saying these lawsuits don't have merits, but I think there must be a higher bar for what is presented as evidence.
Let me be clear - the largest proportion of those are the pointless ones ( the reader already knew what's in the paper ).
Some of this is because research is hard, a lot of it is because of the immense pressure to publish and the strong bias for positive messages ( this approach is better, we discovered X ) to be published, rather than stuff that says - we tried this but it didn't work etc.
> I hope this is not as bad in medicine and health related research.
Same pressure, same human factors.
There is of course an additional factor in cases like this - if your research hints at a link between talc and cancer - is it ethical not to publish while you wait another 5 years for a longer study?
As with social media and society in general, only the most inflated of headlines gets attention causing the gold rush of hyped up results. Nothing can be published without the hype and hyperbole, which then sets the benchmark for the next round of hype.
Publication in this journal would be used as evidence against lawsuits.
Cigarette companies paid for studies designed to produce no conclusive evidence.
I don't see this as a route to progress. What if all you did wrong was follow the wrong process? The bacteria grows better at 10C than 30C. This journal would be full of results by fools and charlatans. The inclusion criteria would have to be much more complex for it to be useful.
I have friends and family working with medicine and health related research, and I don't think it is bad. In fact I'm a bit amazed at how good the Medicine academia is at science, and as comparison how bad computer-science (CSc) is at science.
With very few exceptions, CSc papers don't have any actual science, they don't have a hypothesis and a method to test it, instead most papers in CSc can be summarized as "I did this new thing and I find it cool", the peers simply don't expect you to do actual science. In comparison, in Medicine papers you are expected to follow the scientific method to a T, they have a hypothesis and test it (often heavily relying on statistics), and yes some Medicine papers are bad (with bad methodology, bad sampling, or bad statistics like p-hacking) but even the bad ones try (and fail) to follow the scientific method (or at least pretend to try in case of malicious papers), because the standard is that high.
There's also a case related with cloning (which includes stem cell research) and massive fraud in South Korea 20 or so years ago.[2]
It's a complicated matter: research is a beacon of light on top of a mountain of failed experiments. And not even the government will fund a mountain of failures if your shining discovery at the end can't bring returns to society (or shareholders) in greater value than what you took.
And the pharmaceutical industry never settled for small results. And, unlike ML, it's much harder to test things as an outsider (you can hate the hype, but openAI, hugging face and all these "open" language models makes it much easier to learn, test, tweak and improve things without a master's degree in data engineering.).
It's a grimy area to research even as a pastime. There's a lot of recorded practices both in research and production that makes you question how low can a person go for money
1: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
1) You think these lawsuits have a bigger effect on insurance premiums than an increase in the incidence of ovarian cancer?
2) This is a choice we make as a society, and has little to do with lawsuits. J&J is not the victim of how we finance health care, it is the beneficiary.
Maybe you need your moderate your claiming before publishing something that could cause several damage to someone (That is why most news websites use potential words when publishing something: reported/may/thought/potentially/etc...).
Health related research is in a much worse state than ML unfortunately. ML suffers from metrics gaming and overfitting but there's probably not much outright fraud? Common estimates are that half of all medical papers are making false claims. This blog post of mine from a few years ago has some quotes from editors of well known medical journals where they express disbelief in their own published research base, and some examples of blatant fraud [0]. And this interview with Marc Andreessen indicates why VCs don't invest into biotech startups much [1]:
I had a conversation with the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur, and I said, “do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?” This is a guy who has spent his life in this world. And he said “oh no, that’s not true at all. It’s 90%.” [Richard laughs]. I was like “holy shit,” I was flabbergasted that it could be 90%.
[...]
I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex.
In the same interview Andreessen references a study [2] that implies most medical/drug research stopped working overnight in the year 2000. The reason being that in that year the US govt started requiring drug trials to pre-register their hypothesis and then evaluate their results relative to that hypothesis i.e. they tried to prevent P-hacking.
We identified all large NHLBI supported RCTs between 1970 and 2012 evaluating drugs or dietary supplements for the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease [...] 17 of 30 studies (57%) published prior to 2000 showed a significant benefit of intervention on the primary outcome in comparison to only 2 among the 25 (8%) trials published after 2000
[0] https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422
[1] https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-dea...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Odd that tenure is singled out as the core of the problem. I'd say the undermining of tenure is a large part of the problem.
Research is hard - very hard - you are being asked to discover stuff nobody else has - to push the boundaries of knowledge. I would argue that the idea that one failed research project, and you are out on your ear because of a gap in publishing - is a core part of the problem.
In terms of medical doctors doing research - I'd argue that's a special dangerous mix - medical doctors need to have an element of self-belief just to be able to do their job ( life and death decisions ). Instilling it is part of the training.
That self-belief, plus a lack ( in most cases ) of any in depth scientific research training is a dangerous mix.
Medical training != science training.
In this specific case I have no idea about the rights and wrongs.
I guess that's why in medicine (and some other sciences), meta-reviews are so important: they read dozens or hundreds of papers on the same topic, compare methodologies, and try to deduce more realistic confidence intervals to limit statistical noise. That's how we now know that smoking definitely leads to higher probability of cancer, and most likely that's the case with red meat (and even more likely with smoked or otherwise preserved meat). The risk increases are small enough that a single study can never have the statistical power to prove it. Otherwise, when the famously wrong paper linking vaccines and autism came out, all families of poor autistic children could sue a lot (it was later proved that that one paper was fabricated with malice, but that doesn't change anything, if it were a random error the effect would be the same)
This is why I share your concern for the billions of $ in sues due to this one paper. I have no idea who is abstractly "right" - it might be there was asbestos, or maybe not, and it might be that these talc products increased cancer likelihood, or maybe not. But health, and particularly cancer, is tricky: we all develop multiple cancers, sooner or later, unless we die before. Trying to pinpoint a specific cancer to a source is like fining the proverbial last straw that broke the camel's back - except that in this case it's not the sum of the straws that kill the camel, but rather one random straw across all its load.
That said, I don't want to use this argument to wave company responsibilities away - of course companies who knowingly neglected safety measures, or endangered patient safety, should be punished with large fines (and possibly forced to shut down, in particularly extreme cases). As a European, I'm just uncomfortable with the idea of settling this in spectacular "patient vs. company" trials, where everything is dictated by the ability of lawyers and the will of judges, with results rather randomly ranging from nothing to literally making you rich (and again, your particular cancer might or might not be caused by that... and you can't really know, in any way). With the small additional caveat that you must have survived that in the first place, in order for the company to actually be significantly punished.
"Better" is not a single axis. By your logic, all I need to do is jump higher and higher, and sooner or later I will be able to fly!
You aren't alone in this line of thinking. This fallacy has been written all over "AI" since we started calling it "AI"! That was the biggest mistake of all: by calling any arbitrary project "an Artificial Intelligence", we declare it an instance of the end goal! Now it just needs to be a "better", never "different".
And that's what it means for a company to fail: it doesn't just need to be better, it needs to be different. If we don't allow failure to happen, we can never explore "different".
I don't really want to think about the mechanism by which talc induces weight loss along with the active ingredient.
And I took a rough survey, based on Googling "what happens if I eat talc" and some poison control centers say it's safe and harmless, while others have drunk the asbestos-laced Kool-Aid and say that it will probably cause cancer. This mostly in terms of talcum-based baby powder, which is harder to find than hen's teeth at this point.
Since you’re referring to my parallel comment, I figured I’d let you know that your comment seemed to imply that talc was an active ingredient used for weight loss.
Orlistat (tetrahydrolipstatin) is not talc.
Cancer.org has a page on talc[0] and from it:
> Studies of personal use of talcum powder have had mixed results, although there is some suggestion of a possible increase in ovarian cancer risk. There is very little evidence at this time that any other forms of cancer are linked with consumer use of talcum powder.
> Until more information is available, people who are concerned about possible links between talcum powder and cancer may choose to avoid or limit their use of consumer products that contain it.
Seems like more studies are needed for the consumer level.
[0] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/talc...
This blurb on Wikipedia [0] indicates that asbestos levels might have started being controlled as of 1976.
>...Stringent quality control since 1976, including separating cosmetic- and food-grade talc from "industrial"-grade talc, has largely eliminated this issue, but it remains a potential hazard requiring mitigation in the mining and processing of talc.[39] A 2010 US FDA survey failed to find asbestos in a variety of talc-containing products.[40] A 2018 Reuters investigation asserted that pharmaceuticals company Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that there was asbestos in its baby powder,[41] and in 2020 the company stopped selling its baby powder in the US and Canada.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbest...
The FDA did test randomly test a bunch of talc products and the "FDA found “sub-trace” levels, or no greater than 0.00002%, of chrysotile asbestos contamination in a bottle purchased from an online retailer."
That's 0.2 parts per million, or 200 nanograms in a gram, or 200 micrograms in a kilogram of powder in one sample.
Add on top:
- the FDA tested a number of products and most had zero asbestos (it's a trace contaminant not usually found in talc used for humans)
- the amount of talc that might be suspended in the air when using the products is measured in milligrams (so now we're getting into picograms of asbestos)
- J&J was sued for causing ovarian cancer, there isn't even a scientific link to ovarian cancer for asbestos.
The link to cancer is tenuous as best, but the lawyers smelled blood and could piece together enough of a story to get jury to find J&J guilty based on a "more likely than not" threshold.
In the end the winners in all this are the lawyers.
Look at the studies that were used as evidence, here is a link to the full paper.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9847157/pdf/129...
"Exposure data was obtained by sworn testimony of the mesothelioma patients in all cases, and/or from family members who had direct knowledge of the individual’s use of cosmetic talc and, if present, other sources of asbestos exposure."
That's it. The patient's and family member's word. No testing of samples for asbestos contamination, no review of their home to see if there was asbestos. Just a sworn statement.
I just looked at the two studies referenced in the article - Moline 2019 and Emory, Kradin, and Maddox 2020.
One might assume that they looked at large samples of people with and without talc exposure and with and without a mesothelioma diagnosis to find a correlation. That assumption would be incorrect. Sample sizes were small, n=33 and n=75, respectively. In both studies, all subjects had a mesothelioma diagnosis. As you said, they relied on patient and family member statements that they had no asbestos exposure other than from cosmetic talc (something we now know to be false). They asked subjects when they started using talc, how long they used it, and to what degree they used it, and then calculated average latency to onset from that. They also looked at tissue biopsies in a subset of the subjects (e.g., 11 of the 75 in the later study) and confirmed the presence of asbestos fibers and made an attempt at calculating the fiber concentration in 9 of the 11. It is unclear exactly what these studies purport to demonstrate. There's really no conclusion to draw other than "these people all have mesothelioma, some of them have asbestos fibers in their lungs, they all claim to never have had any exposure to asbestos, and oh by the way they all also used cosmetic talc to varying degrees over the years".
PS: Pool hand chalk is compressed, low-grade talc powder likely to contain asbestos. Climbing chalk is usually made from MgCO3 so it's probably safe.
Did they confirm the link? Did they find asbestos in ovarian tumors?
An overview is at
No; not at all. It's extremely dubious indeed, in fact.
Were they found in ovarian cancers? What's the clear link?
Asbestos is clearly linked to cancer > asbestos was found in talc and known to form with talc naturally > risk of using talc that isn’t pure.
The problem is whether talc is pure. At that point it becomes a question of how much you trust J&J to verify that. My guess is that different mined sources varied in asbestos composition and there likely was some contamination that went undetected. But who knows.
0: https://www.plasticsurgery.org/patient-safety/breast-implant...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/health/breast-implants-ca...
> However, the benefit of implants to women's subjective well-being is less easily quantified. As Angell astutely points out, the FDA assumed that the benefits of breast implants were minimal—especially in women who desired implants for aesthetic reasons—and therefore demanded that implant manufacturers demonstrate virtually absolute safety.
Is it possible Johnson and Johnson have been maligned? I'm not an advocate, I'd be interested in seeing significant evidence that their product causes cancer. However, I'd like to see a firm distinction between talc and talc contaminated with asbestos. The link with asbestos and cancer is clear. I'm not convinced of the problem with talc powder.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5017565-1972-through...
These researchers have gained materially from the output of their research (expert witnesses do not testify for free). Of course if the lawsuit is baseless then it is an evil distraction but the mere act of suing researchers is not, on its face, a problem.
It depends. Were the subjects actually exposed in a meaningful way to another source of asbestos, or did the corporate lawyers go fishing through past address history, purchases, etc. and will argue things like "Subject A visited Australia ten years before the study and was in a city where some older structures were made using asbestos-infused concrete. Did the researchers think to ask their subjects if they'd traveled to Australia?"
One of the subjects previously filed a workers comp claim for asbestos exposure at a textile plant where she worked, despite being considered to have had no asbestos exposure other than from cosmetic talc for the purposes of the quoted study.
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01/24/jj-subsidiary-alleges...
Ideally that should be part of the research paper if done diligently, refuting them even before people doubt them.
> The present study has several limitations. It is both retrospective and uncontrolled, and the cases were submitted in medico‐legal consultation, all of which potentially introduce bias.
I think the researchers were quite open about what they did.
Overall Where there's money to be made there usually is shenanigans. That's goes for both sides.
Plus they’ll be costs involved that will come from that 300,000 too
> LTL's lawsuits allege that the doctors' research allowed them to collect millions of dollars from plaintiffs' lawyers to push a "false narrative" about J&J. The complaint against Moline, for example, said she had made a "small fortune" testifying as a paid expert in lawsuits, receiving over $3 million from her work on asbestos lawsuits. LTL alleged that Kradin also made more than $3 million testifying as a plaintiffs' expert.
When talc is mined, it is hard to ensure that it is sufficiently pure and not mixed with other minerals that are found together with it, like asbestos.
When very pure talc is desired, it is made artificially, by chemical synthesis, using pure magnesium carbonate and pure silicon dioxide. This is much more expensive than natural mined talc.
> When very pure talc is desired, it is made artificially, by chemical synthesis, using pure magnesium carbonate and pure silicon dioxide. This is much more expensive than natural mined talc.
Is there a way to find out what kind of talc was used in a product?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos
1. We need a federal anti-SLAPP law.
2. Discovery is a bitch, J&J.
They're one of the "wow! Maybe we should use the corporate death penalty" companies
The original study had a very small sample size (33 people), which one could argue would be small enough to dismiss. Are there any larger follow up studies?
> Moline published an article in 2019 studying 33 patients who said their only exposure to asbestos came from talc products, and Emory, Kradin and Maddox followed up with a 2020 study of 75 similar patients.
> All four doctors have provided expert testimony in lawsuits against J&J, and their research has been cited in lawsuits where they have not testified, according to the complaints.
> LTL said the researchers concealed the fact that some or all of the patients involved in their studies had been exposed to asbestos from other sources.
If the only thing they used to exclude non-talc exposures was asking the study participants, that seems pretty weak science. And their income depended on not digging too deeply for other exposures.
Scientists = personal liabilities.
Even the threat of losing one's credibility and career for daring to publish science which might possibly harm corporate profits is a horrible thing.
If the scientists formed their own spin-off limited liability company, declared bankruptcy days later, then gave ~$350 to J&J; that would make the playing field a bit more even.
"Junk science" is a charitable description of what was perpetrated in those studies.
- J&J made useful products that may have been problematic according to cutting edge research. Now they are broke and fighting tons of litigation. And they are acting shady in court (thx to their lawyers/management, not their researchers no doubt).
- Researchers did cutting edge work on a relevant topic. Now they are getting sued.
- a load of people are suing J&J after choosing to buy their products. I’m sure some of the plaintiffs have real tough situations and some are motivated by greed/pushy lawyers. These people might get paid.
- the lawyers who did no cutting edge work and made no useful products are getting paid
- regular folk might have to pay more for j&j products
Few winners, and not the winners I would have wanted
My assumption is they determined this first $65 billion will be enough to make the problem go away. Claimants will get a big check, but not big enough to launch further litigation to get more out of the company.
IMO, this is solving a problem that does not exist. If one or two initial claimants were to clean out the whole company then subsequent claimants could sue them for their share, or the courts could step in and enforce a class-action.
I thought Johnson & Johnson was one of the good corporations and would accept and honour its obligations.
And that science has the truth to tell us what right or wrong, not a court.
And that the law system would deliver justice.
I'm just so amazed.
