10 ms·

Johnson and Johnson to pay $6.5B to resolve talc ovarian cancer lawsuits in U.S.

171 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

evereverever 3y ago
But this is only for ovarian cancer. I have a friend that is dying of mesothelioma and her case is still pending. She'll probably die before any judgement is made.
lbeltrame 3y ago
Actual ovarian cancer researcher here. To be perfectly honest, it is the first time I've heard of talc or asbestos being linked to ovarian cancer. Mesothelioma is one thing. One of the drivers of malignant mesothelioma (which is caused by inhalation of asbestos) is a chronic state of inflammation caused by the inability to remove or degrade the asbestos fibers. But in ovarian cancer the major mechanisms are not inflammatory in nature. Depending on the type (there are a few), usually it's a mutation in a key gene that then causes other, larger alterations in the chromosomes and ultimately a malignant outcome. Now, mutations can be caused by inflammation (in particular due to the release of reactive oxygen species or ROS), but as fa as I'm aware, mechanisms of asbestos-like chronic inflammation being a cause (not a link, a cause, I mean with a molecular explanation) are not widely reported in literature and I haven't heard anything like that from my peers (much more knowledgeable than me on the topic).
penguin_booze 3y ago
Is 'settlement' the same as 'blood money payment' (i.e., pay money, escape punishment, move on) in middle-eastern regimes, only sexier-sounding?
QU0507 3y ago
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home https://www.businesswire.com/news/home
_8j50 3y ago
Should these sorts of settlements be allowed? Shoudn't the judge reject the deal on public safety grounds?
user90131313 3y ago
people are dead but executives get away with just sharing some of their profit, not even all profit :) such an equal and wonderful world we make. lets blame some other thing
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I'm not sure what the answer is, but despite how much everyone loves bashing "big corporate executives", I don't think it's a plus in our system that someone can be found liable for something completely contrary to scientific evidence. The evidence that talc causes cancer is "limited at best" (I'll let people do their own searches and come to their own conclusions). But to me this seems similar to silicone breast implants, where billions were paid out and companies bankrupted despite the fact that there is essentially no scientific evidence that silicone breast implants cause cancer.
- BitwiseFool 3y ago
  Talc deposits are often found around asbestos ore. From what I can tell the issue is cross contamination rather than talcum powder itself being carcinogenic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    I'm not motivated to do real research (reading entire source papers/testimony), but every time I look into this, the info is really frustrating and unclear. There seems to be a lot of noise (on one side, corporate self-preservation; and on the other, overly un-objective anti-corporate sentiment). As far as I can tell, talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but you can test for this and use processes that avoid/remedy the contamination, which J&J ostensibly did - meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles. And then every time a scientific link to cancer is mentioned, it's never made clear if the link is significant, and whether the link is from mined talc that might be contaminated, pure talc, or the J&J product on the shelves which might be contaminated, only the latter two being meaningful. And regardless, J&J claims this link is junk science, and are confident enough to be suing to prove that, so I guess I look forward to seeing the result of that. The only case that seemed significant was that J&J was found to have covered up contamination, but they seem to continue to contest this and I can't find any details on what the evidence was. E.g. is J&J claiming it wasn't contaminated, or are they claiming it was, but not to dangerous levels even over decades of use? Very annoying.
InfiniteRand 3y ago
The bigger impact than the fine is I don't see people using baby powder any more. I lean toward the probably not side of the talc-cancer link, but I didn't use baby powder for my kids because it's purely a nice-to-have convenience product. Nice-to-have convenience products are very easy to drop at the slightest potential health risk, and that's what I've seen with baby powder (I'm not seeing much uptake on the alternatives because the talc-cancer link gives a vague maybe-need-to-be-cautious taint to the product category as a whole). I would be interested to hear if someone thinks that usage of baby powder is still popular and my anecdote-based sense of things is wrong.
ImHereToVote 3y ago
More context: https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/ https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/ The kicker: "Court documents have revealed that Johnson & Johnson knew its talc contained asbestos as early as the 1950s"
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - 23B1 3y ago
    What an odd comment. How are you defining 'success' and 'market edge' in this scenario? EDIT: just saw the sarcasm tag, sorry
    - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
      I think they’re satirizing the kind of attacks used to dismiss those who document and complain about these safety issues. But I’m not sure.
      - 23B1 3y ago
        me big dumb
- legitster 3y ago
  I don't know why knowing the geological fact that talc contains trace amounts of asbestos is supposed to sound so guilty. My children's school district contains way more than a trace amount of asbestos. The administrators there know it. They aren't in federal court for failing to slap a warning label on the schools.
  - calfuris 3y ago
    I'm not going to weigh in on the J&J issue, but that's a bad comparison. Asbestos can't do any harm if it doesn't get inside your body. Powdered asbestos (as would be found in talcum powder) can very easily do that, but asbestos bound up in building materials can't do that if left undisturbed. Most things that could disturb asbestos are planned in advance, and as long as the presence of asbestos is known it can be worked around, so asbestos in building materials is not particularly hazardous.
tombert 3y ago
I don’t know anything about biology, so could someone explain the mechanism by which this powder could have caused ovarian cancer? (Genuine question, not rhetorical, not intending to make any point with it)
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  Asbestos fibers have been known for causing these cell changes for decades now.
  - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
    It’s not just the asbestos angle. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc > One of these, published in 1993, was a US National Toxicology Program report, which found that cosmetic grade talc containing no asbestos-like fibres was correlated with tumor formation in rats
    - SigmundA 3y ago
      "rats forced to inhale talc for 6 hours a day, five days a week over at least 113 weeks." Thats a lot different than applying it to your body. If I inhale sand for 6 hours a day for 113 weeks I would not be surprised to get tumors as well, I still go to the beach. Most things around us we touch could cause tumors if we inhaled them constantly over time.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Talc powder is what is used in baby powder. In nature, the majority of talc deposits also contain asbestos. Even worse, the form of asbestos in those deposits is the most cancerous form of it. So basically what was happening was that women were using baby powder as a absorbent to keep their lady parts feeling fresh, but were introducing a whole bunch of asbestos in the process. This is on top of the dubious idea of putting talc on your hoo-haa to begin with.
  - catlikesshrimp 3y ago
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
How can they get a fine this small for a dangerous product they pushed onto markets globally for several decades? There really should be retroactive punishment and fines for past executives and clawing back of money from them and past shareholders. Also am I reading this right? J&J formed a subsidiary that’ll absorb these liabilities? How is that legal? What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company? No, that’s fraud. This is a way to use bankruptcy to pay out claims versus reduce them—the parent company guarantees the subsidiary’s liabilities.
- alt227 3y ago
  The courts seem to have some power here, see this quote from the article: >The company tried filing LTL in bankruptcy twice before — and both times the case was rejected as courts ruled the parent company was financially capable of paying the claims without bankruptcy protection.
- surfingdino 3y ago
  The subsidiary will pay out the settlement and go bankrupt without affecting the parent company's stock price.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Where does the subsidiary get $6.5B from?
    - surfingdino 3y ago
      The parent company.
legitster 3y ago
I'm still of the belief that the judgement was wrong. The link between asbestos and ovarian cancer is incredibly weak, let alone enough to indicate causality. The amount of asbestos actually found in the powder was ridiculously low. The only smoking gun was some internal emails where executives had some higher than baseline internal tests and they argued about the accuracy/reliability of them. Based on everything I have read, I would not be concerned in the slightest about using Talc powder. Asbestos was bad, but people have been conditioned to overrate it's danger to casual exposure because of the lifelong exposure to mesothelioma litigation where lawyers had a field day.
- criddell 3y ago
  Which judgement are you talking about?
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  I've been following this litigation for a long time, and everything in this post is right. The scientific evidence of a causal link between talc usage and ovarian cancer simply doesn't exist. What does exist: extremely sympathetic cancer patients that used talc, a faceless multinational corporation as defendant, a few documents in what was a huge amount of discovery that suggest disagreement over quality controls approaches and confidence in results, a bunch of plaintiff's attorneys on contingency-fees. Add in a significant dose of innuendo and hand-waving and you're eventually going to find a jury that'll give you a billion dollar verdict, and so it happened.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    You should do glyphosate next.
- eganist 3y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230399/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230399/ Have you seen anything newer that resoundingly disputes this and the studies cited herein? More recent, and accounting for more recent studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2093791123000744 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...
languagehacker 3y ago
I really enjoyed this podcast about the issue: https://www.stitcherstudios.com/shows/verified-dust-up https://www.stitcherstudios.com/shows/verified-dust-up. They've known about this issue for a long, long time and decided to just change who they sell it to from wealthy, "discerning" people to groups of lower socioeconomic status. This will be a tarnish on J&J's reputation for a very long time.
jrsdav 3y ago
As a hobby ceramicist, I must acknowledge a certain amount of grumpiness borne from what the talc allegations have done to our niche community. Talc is used extensively in low-mid fire clay bodies as well as an additive to increase plasticity (makes clay easier to work with), and is an excellent source of MgO for fluxing glazes. In short, it's a great material to have in our cabinet [1]. But now there are essentially no more talc sources in the US and the ripple effect seen in our suppliers and manufactures has been a big shock (we are ever at the mercy of big industry!). But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer. Chronic exposure to asbestos causing lung cancer, sure, if it were present in talc in high amounts (which is somewhat dubious in the case of talcum powder). Ultimately I have to conclude that J&J, with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this. So either the research is dated and needs to be reviewed because there is something going on with talc that we don't understand (unlikely, imho), or I'm left speculating that there is something else motivating them to avoid closer scrutiny of their products. - [1]: https://digitalfire.com/material/talc https://digitalfire.com/material/talc
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  J&J is winning virtually all of the suits that go to trial; it's just the ones they are losing end up with multi-billion dollar jury awards. A jury trial is not a quest for scientific truth, and a jury doesn't need to explain itself - the plaintiff lawyers (search your junk mail folder for the word "talc" to see what a great bunch they are) are going to keep rolling the dice in search of a sympathetic jury.
- hedora 3y ago
  One thing that drives me nuts is that you can’t get pure talc in the US (baby powder has stuff added to it, including oils and fragrance; the oils can screw up plastic, etc over time). The last time I looked, it was being sold as though it was a controlled substance alongside laboratory grade ethanol, etc. On the one hand, baby powder causes ovarian cancer (there is evidence that this is true for talc that is not contaminated with asbestos, despite J&J’s long disinformation campaigns). On the other, if you want to use it in an application where it is perfectly safe, it’s essentially impossible to buy an appropriate product.
happytoexplain 3y ago
This is such a weird topic. People should be skeptical as hell of corporations when it comes to safety and honesty, but everything about this one seems so tenuous. Not to say there is no fault, but the rulings just don't seem right as reported. Even the normally level-headed HN crowd are using verbiage like typical un-objective headline writers: "riddled with asbestos" "introducing a whole bunch of asbestos [while using baby powder]" "[asbestos is] known for causing [cancer] for decades" (this is implicitly referring to inhalation - the link to ovarian cancer via genital contact is way, way less solid, isn't it?)
- ryandrake 3y ago
  You have an entity (the corporation) that: - is amoral - is required and heavily incentivized by shareholders to maximize business value/output/growth at all costs - is lead by people who cannot be held responsible for bad behavior (prison time) You have to expect the worst. You have to assume they are going to do the absolute worst behavior they can get away with, that they will operate up to a millimeter away from the law, and sometimes go over the line if they think they can. The entire system is set up such that they would be foolish not to. IMO we should presume guilt instead of innocence when it comes to corporations--there is no reason to think they would voluntarily uphold some ethical or moral code if it meant lower profits.
  - prewett 3y ago
    Johnson and Johnson is very explicit NOT amoral. They have guiding principles that basically put the needs of their customers first, then employees, communities, and finally shareholders. [1] These old companies were founded in a society that had clear values, and many of those companies reflect those values. Even modern companies frequently have moral values, for instance, Zappos. As a society, though, we have jettisoned those old, constraining Christian/Protestant values, and the prevailing value, to the extent I can identify it, is a Marxist, everything is just the use power to oppress. If we take that as our value system, then that is what we'll become. So if you don't like companies living out that value, then it behooves you to promote the kind of values that benefit society and bring people together. [1] https://www.jnj.com/our-credo https://www.jnj.com/our-credo
langsoul-com 3y ago
Pretty sus how they could shift all liabilities onto a subsidiary, call bankruptcy and then call if a day. Isn't this just abusing the system?
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Yes. But it doesn't always work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
- dannyw 3y ago
  Yes, one that was rejected by court twice.
- triceratops 3y ago
  Matt Levine steelmanned this approach in a column. What J&J tried to do was fund the subsidiary with however much they thought they'd be liable for and treat claimants as creditors to the bankrupt subsidiary. Bankruptcy law is designed to deal fairly with all creditors. The alternative is that a couple of gigantic judgments against J&J right at the beginning would leave no money for people who sued later. The courts rejected this approach, not because of unfairness specifically, but because J&J had provided funding to the subsidiary. If the subsidiary has money, it can't be bankrupt yet. If the subsidiary ultimately pays all claims to everyone who is entitled (a big if), it isn't necessarily wrong. [1] The one downside is claimants can't go after all of J&J's assets in the event of a huge victory. I'm recounting all this from columns I read while back, so someone please correct me if I got details wrong. 1. https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-definition-5225888 https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-defin...
  - legitster 3y ago
    Levine's write up about the situation was great: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-levine-johnson-johnson-s-jnj-bankruptcy-didn-t-work https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-l... >"So you might want to file for bankruptcy to pay off all your victims fairly and, perhaps, cheaply, even if their claims will not really “bankrupt” you in the traditional sense. But in fact that is kind of a drastic step, expensive and disruptive and risky and probably bad for shareholders. No chief executive officer of a big company wants to file for bankruptcy if it is not strictly necessary. > There is a neater approach: > -You put the liabilities in a box. You create a new subsidiary, you put the product-that-kills-people business in that subsidiary, and you transfer the liabilities related to that product to the subsidiary. This is, in general, hard to do, but in fact Texas has a weird merger law that allows it: You can “merge” your company into two companies, one with the liabilities and one with the rest of the business. > -You have the box — the new subsidiary with all the product liabilities — file for bankruptcy. You get fair and consistent adjudication of the product claims, inside the box, and the rest of the company just goes along relatively normally. > This is called the “Texas two-step.” In its extreme form it sounds like very bad cheating: You can’t really put all the liabilities and none of the money in the box; that is just a way to defraud victims, and surely they’d find a way to do something about it. But a milder form of the Texas Two-Step is that you put the liabilities in the box, put the box in bankruptcy, but have the parent company guarantee its product liabilities. (Perhaps up to some reasonable number, perhaps not.) Then you can say “no, we are not doing this to get out of paying our liabilities; we are doing it to pay them in a fairer and more consistent way.”
mvkel 3y ago
Regardless of the defenses used, a company trying every possible defense they can is simply good corporate counsel. Like when you're paying taxes, an accountant using every possible tactic they can to reduce your tax burden is simply good accounting.
wolverine876 3y ago
What is required for punishments to significantly deter and otherwise affect corporate behavior? Is there research on that question? I assume part of the answer is some ratio of corporate assets or revenue, as well as how the fines are implemented.

171 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

But this is only for ovarian cancer. I have a friend that is dying of mesothelioma and her case is still pending. She'll probably die before any judgement is made.

lbeltrame 3y ago

Actual ovarian cancer researcher here. To be perfectly honest, it is the first time I've heard of talc or asbestos being linked to ovarian cancer. Mesothelioma is one thing. One of the drivers of malignant mesothelioma (which is caused by inhalation of asbestos) is a chronic state of inflammation caused by the inability to remove or degrade the asbestos fibers. But in ovarian cancer the major mechanisms are not inflammatory in nature. Depending on the type (there are a few), usually it's a mutation in a key gene that then causes other, larger alterations in the chromosomes and ultimately a malignant outcome. Now, mutations can be caused by inflammation (in particular due to the release of reactive oxygen species or ROS), but as fa as I'm aware, mechanisms of asbestos-like chronic inflammation being a cause (not a link, a cause, I mean with a molecular explanation) are not widely reported in literature and I haven't heard anything like that from my peers (much more knowledgeable than me on the topic).

penguin_booze 3y ago

Is 'settlement' the same as 'blood money payment' (i.e., pay money, escape punishment, move on) in middle-eastern regimes, only sexier-sounding?

QU0507 3y ago

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home https://www.businesswire.com/news/home

_8j50 3y ago

Should these sorts of settlements be allowed? Shoudn't the judge reject the deal on public safety grounds?

user90131313 3y ago

people are dead but executives get away with just sharing some of their profit, not even all profit :) such an equal and wonderful world we make. lets blame some other thing

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I'm not sure what the answer is, but despite how much everyone loves bashing "big corporate executives", I don't think it's a plus in our system that someone can be found liable for something completely contrary to scientific evidence. The evidence that talc causes cancer is "limited at best" (I'll let people do their own searches and come to their own conclusions). But to me this seems similar to silicone breast implants, where billions were paid out and companies bankrupted despite the fact that there is essentially no scientific evidence that silicone breast implants cause cancer.

BitwiseFool 3y ago
Talc deposits are often found around asbestos ore. From what I can tell the issue is cross contamination rather than talcum powder itself being carcinogenic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  I'm not motivated to do real research (reading entire source papers/testimony), but every time I look into this, the info is really frustrating and unclear. There seems to be a lot of noise (on one side, corporate self-preservation; and on the other, overly un-objective anti-corporate sentiment). As far as I can tell, talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but you can test for this and use processes that avoid/remedy the contamination, which J&J ostensibly did - meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles. And then every time a scientific link to cancer is mentioned, it's never made clear if the link is significant, and whether the link is from mined talc that might be contaminated, pure talc, or the J&J product on the shelves which might be contaminated, only the latter two being meaningful. And regardless, J&J claims this link is junk science, and are confident enough to be suing to prove that, so I guess I look forward to seeing the result of that. The only case that seemed significant was that J&J was found to have covered up contamination, but they seem to continue to contest this and I can't find any details on what the evidence was. E.g. is J&J claiming it wasn't contaminated, or are they claiming it was, but not to dangerous levels even over decades of use? Very annoying.

InfiniteRand 3y ago

The bigger impact than the fine is I don't see people using baby powder any more. I lean toward the probably not side of the talc-cancer link, but I didn't use baby powder for my kids because it's purely a nice-to-have convenience product. Nice-to-have convenience products are very easy to drop at the slightest potential health risk, and that's what I've seen with baby powder (I'm not seeing much uptake on the alternatives because the talc-cancer link gives a vague maybe-need-to-be-cautious taint to the product category as a whole). I would be interested to hear if someone thinks that usage of baby powder is still popular and my anecdote-based sense of things is wrong.

ImHereToVote 3y ago

More context: https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/ https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/ The kicker: "Court documents have revealed that Johnson & Johnson knew its talc contained asbestos as early as the 1950s"

ImHereToVote 3y ago
[flagged]
- 23B1 3y ago
  What an odd comment. How are you defining 'success' and 'market edge' in this scenario? EDIT: just saw the sarcasm tag, sorry
  - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
    I think they’re satirizing the kind of attacks used to dismiss those who document and complain about these safety issues. But I’m not sure.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      me big dumb
legitster 3y ago
I don't know why knowing the geological fact that talc contains trace amounts of asbestos is supposed to sound so guilty. My children's school district contains way more than a trace amount of asbestos. The administrators there know it. They aren't in federal court for failing to slap a warning label on the schools.
- calfuris 3y ago
  I'm not going to weigh in on the J&J issue, but that's a bad comparison. Asbestos can't do any harm if it doesn't get inside your body. Powdered asbestos (as would be found in talcum powder) can very easily do that, but asbestos bound up in building materials can't do that if left undisturbed. Most things that could disturb asbestos are planned in advance, and as long as the presence of asbestos is known it can be worked around, so asbestos in building materials is not particularly hazardous.

tombert 3y ago

I don’t know anything about biology, so could someone explain the mechanism by which this powder could have caused ovarian cancer? (Genuine question, not rhetorical, not intending to make any point with it)

ImHereToVote 3y ago
Asbestos fibers have been known for causing these cell changes for decades now.
- blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
  It’s not just the asbestos angle. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc > One of these, published in 1993, was a US National Toxicology Program report, which found that cosmetic grade talc containing no asbestos-like fibres was correlated with tumor formation in rats
  - SigmundA 3y ago
    "rats forced to inhale talc for 6 hours a day, five days a week over at least 113 weeks." Thats a lot different than applying it to your body. If I inhale sand for 6 hours a day for 113 weeks I would not be surprised to get tumors as well, I still go to the beach. Most things around us we touch could cause tumors if we inhaled them constantly over time.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Talc powder is what is used in baby powder. In nature, the majority of talc deposits also contain asbestos. Even worse, the form of asbestos in those deposits is the most cancerous form of it. So basically what was happening was that women were using baby powder as a absorbent to keep their lady parts feeling fresh, but were introducing a whole bunch of asbestos in the process. This is on top of the dubious idea of putting talc on your hoo-haa to begin with.
- catlikesshrimp 3y ago

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

How can they get a fine this small for a dangerous product they pushed onto markets globally for several decades? There really should be retroactive punishment and fines for past executives and clawing back of money from them and past shareholders. Also am I reading this right? J&J formed a subsidiary that’ll absorb these liabilities? How is that legal? What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company? No, that’s fraud. This is a way to use bankruptcy to pay out claims versus reduce them—the parent company guarantees the subsidiary’s liabilities.
alt227 3y ago
The courts seem to have some power here, see this quote from the article: >The company tried filing LTL in bankruptcy twice before — and both times the case was rejected as courts ruled the parent company was financially capable of paying the claims without bankruptcy protection.
surfingdino 3y ago
The subsidiary will pay out the settlement and go bankrupt without affecting the parent company's stock price.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Where does the subsidiary get $6.5B from?
  - surfingdino 3y ago
    The parent company.

legitster 3y ago

I'm still of the belief that the judgement was wrong. The link between asbestos and ovarian cancer is incredibly weak, let alone enough to indicate causality. The amount of asbestos actually found in the powder was ridiculously low. The only smoking gun was some internal emails where executives had some higher than baseline internal tests and they argued about the accuracy/reliability of them. Based on everything I have read, I would not be concerned in the slightest about using Talc powder. Asbestos was bad, but people have been conditioned to overrate it's danger to casual exposure because of the lifelong exposure to mesothelioma litigation where lawyers had a field day.

criddell 3y ago
Which judgement are you talking about?
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
I've been following this litigation for a long time, and everything in this post is right. The scientific evidence of a causal link between talc usage and ovarian cancer simply doesn't exist. What does exist: extremely sympathetic cancer patients that used talc, a faceless multinational corporation as defendant, a few documents in what was a huge amount of discovery that suggest disagreement over quality controls approaches and confidence in results, a bunch of plaintiff's attorneys on contingency-fees. Add in a significant dose of innuendo and hand-waving and you're eventually going to find a jury that'll give you a billion dollar verdict, and so it happened.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  You should do glyphosate next.
eganist 3y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230399/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230399/ Have you seen anything newer that resoundingly disputes this and the studies cited herein? More recent, and accounting for more recent studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2093791123000744 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...

languagehacker 3y ago

I really enjoyed this podcast about the issue: https://www.stitcherstudios.com/shows/verified-dust-up https://www.stitcherstudios.com/shows/verified-dust-up. They've known about this issue for a long, long time and decided to just change who they sell it to from wealthy, "discerning" people to groups of lower socioeconomic status. This will be a tarnish on J&J's reputation for a very long time.

jrsdav 3y ago

As a hobby ceramicist, I must acknowledge a certain amount of grumpiness borne from what the talc allegations have done to our niche community. Talc is used extensively in low-mid fire clay bodies as well as an additive to increase plasticity (makes clay easier to work with), and is an excellent source of MgO for fluxing glazes. In short, it's a great material to have in our cabinet [1]. But now there are essentially no more talc sources in the US and the ripple effect seen in our suppliers and manufactures has been a big shock (we are ever at the mercy of big industry!). But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer. Chronic exposure to asbestos causing lung cancer, sure, if it were present in talc in high amounts (which is somewhat dubious in the case of talcum powder). Ultimately I have to conclude that J&J, with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this. So either the research is dated and needs to be reviewed because there is something going on with talc that we don't understand (unlikely, imho), or I'm left speculating that there is something else motivating them to avoid closer scrutiny of their products. - [1]: https://digitalfire.com/material/talc https://digitalfire.com/material/talc

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
J&J is winning virtually all of the suits that go to trial; it's just the ones they are losing end up with multi-billion dollar jury awards. A jury trial is not a quest for scientific truth, and a jury doesn't need to explain itself - the plaintiff lawyers (search your junk mail folder for the word "talc" to see what a great bunch they are) are going to keep rolling the dice in search of a sympathetic jury.
hedora 3y ago
One thing that drives me nuts is that you can’t get pure talc in the US (baby powder has stuff added to it, including oils and fragrance; the oils can screw up plastic, etc over time). The last time I looked, it was being sold as though it was a controlled substance alongside laboratory grade ethanol, etc. On the one hand, baby powder causes ovarian cancer (there is evidence that this is true for talc that is not contaminated with asbestos, despite J&J’s long disinformation campaigns). On the other, if you want to use it in an application where it is perfectly safe, it’s essentially impossible to buy an appropriate product.

happytoexplain 3y ago

This is such a weird topic. People should be skeptical as hell of corporations when it comes to safety and honesty, but everything about this one seems so tenuous. Not to say there is no fault, but the rulings just don't seem right as reported. Even the normally level-headed HN crowd are using verbiage like typical un-objective headline writers: "riddled with asbestos" "introducing a whole bunch of asbestos [while using baby powder]" "[asbestos is] known for causing [cancer] for decades" (this is implicitly referring to inhalation - the link to ovarian cancer via genital contact is way, way less solid, isn't it?)

ryandrake 3y ago
You have an entity (the corporation) that: - is amoral - is required and heavily incentivized by shareholders to maximize business value/output/growth at all costs - is lead by people who cannot be held responsible for bad behavior (prison time) You have to expect the worst. You have to assume they are going to do the absolute worst behavior they can get away with, that they will operate up to a millimeter away from the law, and sometimes go over the line if they think they can. The entire system is set up such that they would be foolish not to. IMO we should presume guilt instead of innocence when it comes to corporations--there is no reason to think they would voluntarily uphold some ethical or moral code if it meant lower profits.
- prewett 3y ago
  Johnson and Johnson is very explicit NOT amoral. They have guiding principles that basically put the needs of their customers first, then employees, communities, and finally shareholders. [1] These old companies were founded in a society that had clear values, and many of those companies reflect those values. Even modern companies frequently have moral values, for instance, Zappos. As a society, though, we have jettisoned those old, constraining Christian/Protestant values, and the prevailing value, to the extent I can identify it, is a Marxist, everything is just the use power to oppress. If we take that as our value system, then that is what we'll become. So if you don't like companies living out that value, then it behooves you to promote the kind of values that benefit society and bring people together. [1] https://www.jnj.com/our-credo https://www.jnj.com/our-credo

langsoul-com 3y ago

Pretty sus how they could shift all liabilities onto a subsidiary, call bankruptcy and then call if a day. Isn't this just abusing the system?

kayodelycaon 3y ago
Yes. But it doesn't always work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
dannyw 3y ago
Yes, one that was rejected by court twice.
triceratops 3y ago
Matt Levine steelmanned this approach in a column. What J&J tried to do was fund the subsidiary with however much they thought they'd be liable for and treat claimants as creditors to the bankrupt subsidiary. Bankruptcy law is designed to deal fairly with all creditors. The alternative is that a couple of gigantic judgments against J&J right at the beginning would leave no money for people who sued later. The courts rejected this approach, not because of unfairness specifically, but because J&J had provided funding to the subsidiary. If the subsidiary has money, it can't be bankrupt yet. If the subsidiary ultimately pays all claims to everyone who is entitled (a big if), it isn't necessarily wrong. [1] The one downside is claimants can't go after all of J&J's assets in the event of a huge victory. I'm recounting all this from columns I read while back, so someone please correct me if I got details wrong. 1. https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-definition-5225888 https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-defin...
- legitster 3y ago
  Levine's write up about the situation was great: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-levine-johnson-johnson-s-jnj-bankruptcy-didn-t-work https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-l... >"So you might want to file for bankruptcy to pay off all your victims fairly and, perhaps, cheaply, even if their claims will not really “bankrupt” you in the traditional sense. But in fact that is kind of a drastic step, expensive and disruptive and risky and probably bad for shareholders. No chief executive officer of a big company wants to file for bankruptcy if it is not strictly necessary. > There is a neater approach: > -You put the liabilities in a box. You create a new subsidiary, you put the product-that-kills-people business in that subsidiary, and you transfer the liabilities related to that product to the subsidiary. This is, in general, hard to do, but in fact Texas has a weird merger law that allows it: You can “merge” your company into two companies, one with the liabilities and one with the rest of the business. > -You have the box — the new subsidiary with all the product liabilities — file for bankruptcy. You get fair and consistent adjudication of the product claims, inside the box, and the rest of the company just goes along relatively normally. > This is called the “Texas two-step.” In its extreme form it sounds like very bad cheating: You can’t really put all the liabilities and none of the money in the box; that is just a way to defraud victims, and surely they’d find a way to do something about it. But a milder form of the Texas Two-Step is that you put the liabilities in the box, put the box in bankruptcy, but have the parent company guarantee its product liabilities. (Perhaps up to some reasonable number, perhaps not.) Then you can say “no, we are not doing this to get out of paying our liabilities; we are doing it to pay them in a fairer and more consistent way.”

mvkel 3y ago

Regardless of the defenses used, a company trying every possible defense they can is simply good corporate counsel. Like when you're paying taxes, an accountant using every possible tactic they can to reduce your tax burden is simply good accounting.

wolverine876 3y ago

What is required for punishments to significantly deter and otherwise affect corporate behavior? Is there research on that question? I assume part of the answer is some ratio of corporate assets or revenue, as well as how the fines are implemented.