So wait, J&J have already put aside 9 billion dollars for potential liability for the talc baby powder cancer claims and have stopped selling talc baby powder in North America, but yet they are suing researchers who made the issue known and constantly parroting that they aren’t admitting any wrongdoing. Nice.
There is a great deal of evidence to back up their claim.
the researchers or JJs claim?
JJ. But they also released some very specific details such as the name of people exposed and proof of exposure from other sources than talcum powder that was ignored. JJ would be quite liable if they even get a single detail intentionally wrong. I would tend to believe they released accurate details.
?? You believe a corporation by default is releasing accurate details in the context of clearing themselves of wrong doing?
That’s every corporation’s first step no matter how incredibly obvious that they are wrong.
Not by default but I do believe they should be allowed to press their case. Do you not?
And it is far from obvious.
This is not the only shitty thing J&J has done, not by a longshot.
All you need to know is how they pushed opioids on a generation of young people for nearly a decade without repercussions. How can you expect an entity like that to ever tell the truth against their own self interests?
Yeh, sure. Let’s trust the corporation that is discontinuing the sale of talc based baby powder world wide, and is wanting to settle for $9 billion.
Either JNJ are actually doing the right thing here… or they are cutting losses, protecting themselves, looking after shareholders, whatever.
Maybe it’s cheaper than trying to recover from such a PR disaster.
Maybe turns out that cornstarch is cheaper/easier for baby powder, and $9b gets rid of a problem, solves marketing issues of cornstarch, and has long-term savings.Maybe I’m wrong and paranoid.
But I don’t trust JNJTo put that in perspective for folks, if money was seconds, 9000 seconds is ~2.5 hours , 9 million seconds is ~104 days, 9 billion seconds is ~285 years.
I’m sure this won’t have any chilling effects amongst the researchers who keep us all safe.
Edit to add that Johnson & Johnson is/was also trying to use patent loopholes to make sure poor people die from tuberculosis; until the internet got mad.
The secondary patent particularly irked some advocates because the drug’s development was largely underwritten by public funds, according to a 2020 analysis. That study found public sector funds contributed $455 million to $747 million to getting bedaquiline to market, compared to $90 million to $240 million from J&J.
We pay for the development of the drug, they get the patent, then we pay for the drug. Socialize cost, privatize profits.
most of the hype about danger from talcum powder is quite fake. the link between cancer and the powder is hugely tenuous and the researchers are quite shameful. Poor J&J are being victimised when there are millions sufferring from the absence of their valuable and safe talcum powder,
That’s a SLAPP suit.
Does the place they sued them in even have SLAPP laws?
We desperately, above all other issues, need to resolve the fact that big companies can win in court simply by paying until the other guy can’t afford to keep dealing with the legal system.
We desperately, above all other issues, need to resolve the fact that big companies can win in court simply by paying
In the Soviet Union, capital punishment was carried out by various methods, including firing squads, hanging, and later, the use of a single gunshot to the back of the head. These methods were employed for different periods throughout the Soviet Union’s history, depending on the prevailing laws and policies.
I’ll take our current system over the Soviet one every day of the week. Not starving and not living under an evil dictatorship beats an unfair court system.
I… what?
What does that have to do with the conversation being had here?
Also, not that any of this is relevant to the actual topic at hand, but that’s different from the United States… How?
Just this year Idaho approved the firing squad as a means of execution. It joined 4 other states.
We now use the lethal injection, but research is showing that it isn’t painless, it just looks like it is. We used the electric chair for decades, and hanging before that.
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 that’s true, it doesn’t look good for the researchers.
But at the same time, J&J has to hold some responsibility for having their “asbestos-contaminated consumer talc products” on store shelves!
It really depends on the type of study it was, and what these sources of asbestos were supposed to have been.
If they were doing a comparison study, so long as the control group was exposed to asbestos in similar amounts and in similar environments, it’s still a strong finding. J&J shouting “they were exposed to other asbestos!” would just be an empty attack on the researchers’ characters, and an attempt to falsely discredit them to an uncritical and uneducated public.
Things do seem to be a bit more complicated than that, though, as these are post-hoc investigations with no control. That said, it looks like they tried to do their due diligence to filter out participants who had known environmental exposure to asbestos. If some of them lied or mis-remembered, then it’s up to J&J to show that the researchers were negligent or operating in bad faith.
That’s going to be a pretty big hurdle to climb. I don’t believe they actually intend to climb it.
The fact that the researchers asked about environmental during recruitment, plus the fact that J&J is only claiming that a small handful of people involved in the study were exposed to other sources of asbestos, really shows this for what it is: An attempt to scare researchers away from doing research, and especially from agreeing to be provide expert testimony in lawsuits.
One of the defendants here even has a new paper out this past January that includes patients with known environmental exposure to asbestos, and they show that cumulative exposure from all sources matters. Including exposure from talc:
Conclusion
For individuals with exposure to asbestos through cosmetic talc usage and additional alternate sources, all exposures contribute to the development of mesothelioma. Published case reports and case series have identified over 100 individuals whose sole exposure to asbestos was through cosmetic talcum powder usage.This finding basically cuts J&J’s apparent argument off at the knees, and was published months before they ever filed suit. They’d have been aware of it at the time of filing. They don’t seem to have anything here. Just the opportunity to try and make their detractors look as dirty as they are in the eyes of people who haven’t read any of the research.
The complaint is here. Start on page 23 for the specifics. Basically, they’re saying the patients in the study were actually plaintiffs in other litigation, and it came out in that litigation that many were known to have been exposed to asbestos fibers in homes, schools, or workplaces.
Holy crap that was a crazy read. LTL, the North Carolina shell company owned by J&J, tragically lost sales revenue and went bankrupt “because of their 2020 study”. “To set the record straight” they are de-anonymizing the data to dox 5 of the participants and then going through those cancer patient’s lives to say that they had contact with industrial asbestos at some point. Their main claim against the only patient they have positively identified, Lanzo because he tried to sue J&J, is that his middle school locker room and basement later had asbestos pipes removed. Their claim against #2 after matching her tumor stats is that her dad worked with pipes that had asbestos. The third, again matched by tumor measurements, had a husband who once told a UCLA doc on a visit that he was doing some demolition that might’ve had asbestos. The fourth, “matched” only by her age, smoked and sued Kent cigarettes which were proven to contain asbestos. The last is an age match to a cleaning lady who sued J&J previously and said in court she cleaned buildings and navy ships that “possibly had asbestos”.
Their claim is that since at least one patient might’ve come into contact with asbestos from a source that wasn’t baby powder the entire study is false. Basically, they dig through peoples lives and if they ever visited somewhere that has any asbestos on record or lived with someone who mentioned asbestos worries to a doctor they think you should be disqualified from being linked to Johnson and Johnson.
Which seems rather legitimate.
Except that there were over 20 participants in the study and J&J is trying to claim potential, possible exposures to asbestos that they could only come up for 6 of them means that nothing in the study is correct.
That is a significantly high number as it is six ‘proved’ cases. Some people wouldn’t even know if they were exposed by other sources and even if they knew, would it be documented? Chances are we have all been exposed to asbestos and other carcinogenic chemicals both natural and man-made. The correlation was very weak to begin and it seems some of the people that did this study did willfully ignore details that make is suspect. I like to think all scientists are working on our behalf but there is a monetary motive to attain certain positive results in this case. We shouldn’t automatically give them a pass.
They don’t automatically get a pass. They get peer reviewed.
It’s also not one study. They’ve done multiple over the years, with hundreds of participants. They’ve done studies where they include people with known environmental exposure, and they still find that exposure to talcum powder counts as part of cumulative exposure.
Is it possible they’re just flagrantly lying about their research results? Of course. Tell good enough lies and it becomes up to reproduction studies to find contradicting results. But there’s as much money, if not more, to be found in finding those contradicting results, and yet…
exactly. J&J are the victims in this situation. People do not realise it yet. Most of those int he legal community know the real fault lies in the stupid lawyers that J&J used first time round. Lousy and shoddy.
