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Johnson & Johnson's stock slammed after report it knew of asbestos in baby powder
Shares of Johnson & Johnson tumbled Friday, after a Reuters report that the drug and consumer-products company knew for decades that its baby talcum powder was contaminated with asbestos, a known carcinogen, that is alleged to have caused cancer in thousands of its customers.
The stock ended 10% lower on Friday, marking its largest one-day percentage decline in 16 years and lowest close in nearly four months, according to FactSet data. It led decliners on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 on the day, and accounted for about 101 points of the Dow's 497-point loss.
[...] Reuters said an examination of internal company memos and other documents found the New Jersey–based company was aware of the presence of small amounts of asbestos in its products from as early as 1971 but failed to disclose that fact to regulators or to the general public.
Reuters stands by J&J report, says it was based 'entirely' on Johnson & Johnson documents
Reuters reporter Lisa Girion stands by her report that Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos was in its baby powder. "Our report on the fact that J&J was aware of small amounts of asbestos in its talc, in its baby power, in the ore that it mined in Vermont to make baby power, is based entirely on their documents," Girion told CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Friday.
The Reuters story sent J&J shares down 9 percent on Friday and prompted a response from the health-care company that called the article "one-sided, false and inflammatory." "Simply put, the Reuters story is an absurd conspiracy theory, in that it apparently has spanned over 40 years, orchestrated among generations of global regulators, the world's foremost scientists and universities, leading independent labs, and J&J employees themselves," the company said in a statement.
See also: Asbestos Opens New Legal Front in Battle Over Johnson's Baby Powder
Those J&J Baby-Powder Lawsuits Aren't Going Away
Johnson & Johnson loses $39.8 billion in market value in one day after report claims it knew about asbestos in its baby powder
Previously: The Baby Powder Trials: How Courts Deal with Inconclusive Science
Johnson & Johnson Ordered to Pay $417m in Latest Talc Cancer Case
$417 Million Talc Cancer Verdict Against Johnson & Johnson Tossed Out
Johnson & Johnson Loses New Jersey Talc Cancer Case
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 17 2018, @01:06PM (6 children)
That's what we call a good reason in the real world. Occam's razor does need to be explained here rather than merely saying without even a shred of proof of that the response is "lying, jeering".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 17 2018, @01:57PM (5 children)
No, the evidence is against them. Corporations have concealed problems for decades. Smoking was known to cause health problems in the 1960s, and tobacco companies were forced to put warning labels on their products in the 1970s, but in 1994, they were still lying. Every one of them said that they believed nicotine was not addictive, though everyone had been told over and over and over that nicotine was indeed addictive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08 [youtube.com] They pioneered the new propaganda of "doubt is our product", in which no amount of scientific evidence could ever settle an issue.
As far back as the 1930s, Bisphenol A was known to be similar to estrogen, and it was feared that similarity could cause problems. But instead of checking this suspicion out, the plastics industry buried their heads in the sand and managed to get everyone else to do so too. It's only in this century that BPA awareness has grown so strong that industry had to cut back. So there's a 7 decade delay.
Then there's lead. Wasn't banned in paint until the 1970s, and was used in gasoline until phased out in the 1980s, despite the Romans having found out near 2000 years ago the hard way that lead was toxic. Still used in plumbing to this day, and Flint, Michigan knows what a bad idea that is. A 2014 law cut back on lead in plumbing, but didn't entirely eliminate it.
Then we have #Exxonknew. As far back as the 1970s, maybe even the 1960s, those bastards running Big Oil suspected CO2 pollution would cause problems, but they buried it.
Another that special interests defended was asbestos.
Radioactivity is yet another. Would you like to work for the company that made radium paint? Paint watch dials with paint that glows with radioactivity? Read up on the Radium Girls. It's another ugly story of greed and motivated denial.
So that's 6 separate industries that conspired and propagandized to cover up problems, for decades. There's lots more than that. I didn't mention Big Pharma, another bad one. It's so pervasive that, yeah, I tend to believe the accusations against J+J. Can you come up with anywhere near that many examples of corporations being responsible and voluntarily ending the use of problematic substances and methods long before public outcry and new regulations would have forced them to?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 17 2018, @02:14PM (3 children)
While I generally agree with your rant, I know that small companies and especially large corporations stop the development of products that use problematic substances every day all around the world, before they get significant investment into them. The problem comes when X billion dollars have been sunk into development of a product which now generates Y billion dollars of annual revenue and the decision makers will lose Z million dollars in bonuses and other compensation if they put a stop to it, and then a problem with a substance in a product is discovered.
Medical latex is maybe an example of early discontinuation of a widely used substance before a total blowup - in the late 1980s it was becoming apparent that natural latex was a significant problem, and by the late 1990s profit motivated companies managed to develop and market better alternatives that have mostly displaced the use of natural latex in medical applications today. IMO, this worked, in-part, due to the (relative) lack of IP protection and exclusivity in latex products, whoever came out with the "better" glove first not only was first to market, but had something they could license for profit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 17 2018, @04:44PM (2 children)
> and then a problem with a substance in a product is discovered.
And then? Sometimes that's the timeline, but not always. Such as, lead. They knew it was a problem before modern industry sunk a lot of investment in it. And, they have plenty of perfectly acceptable alternatives. Brass does not have to have any lead in it at all, they only add it to make machining a little easier. The machining tools last longer. But it can be done without. There's also bismuth brass, which makes the machining about as easy as leaded brass does. There's just no acceptable excuse for having ever added lead to the brass in our plumbing.
I'm thinking that the Big One is going to be #ExxonKnew. The fools propagandized against a problem, Global Warming and the consequent Sea Level Rise, that is potentially so big it could cause another World War. If the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica melt, ocean levels will rise so much that most of Florida will be underwater. What will be left is an island where central Florida is now. Coastal lands all over the world will be flooded, trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure will have to be abandoned. And that's not the worst of it. If our food supply is disrupted, and it almost certainly will be, millions will go hungry. There will be a reckoning. It won't be just Big Oil on trial for its life. It will be Capitalism itself. People will know why things came to that pass: unrestrained greed. Capitalistic pursuit of short term wealth. Corruption of the rule makers and rule enforcers. Everyone will see that the capitalistic society, the blind worship of wealth, and Prosperity Gospel thinking was folly, and failed us all very badly. We survived the cruel folly and madness of WWII. All the more folly to have pulled it, when you would have thought memories of WWI were still fresh enough to give people pause. We survived the Cold War, kept it from ever become hot, though there were entirely too many close calls-- the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Able Archer military exercises of 1983. Now, can we survive this? This war is best fought softly, as soon as possible, by heading off the coming sea level rise.
And why has Big Oil done this to us all? For more money that they did not really need.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 17 2018, @05:44PM
Lead was a bad one, but you have to roll back to when lead was really introduced into the various industries... the 1920s were a VERY different time than today, and that's the kind of world that started building internal combustion engines that "ran better" with lead in the fuel. Even in the 1950s, the solution to pollution was still dilution. Even in the 1990s when Dade county and many other metro areas were instituting vapor recovery devices on automotive fueling pumps, environmentally conscious Monroe county (the Florida keys) passed on the initiative because of their long-thin geography where the vapors released would rapidly dissipate - at least that was the front-line explanation, there's also the fact that pleasure boats use more gasoline in the Florida keys than automobiles and that vapor recovery from many yachts' fuel tanks would also recover crap you don't want to have to deal with in your fuel...
Al Gore's Grandfather may have predicted CO2 based global warming in 1922, but the bulk of society wasn't primed to listen at that point. On a slight tangent, I remember some movie from the 1960s where a little girl is crying about all the baby seals being clubbed to death, but the narrator reassures her in a patronizing tone that nature replenishes their numbers and there are always more next year. That was the mindset that a lot of the fools who are still in power grew up in, and they're never going to unlearn it.
Clearly, you don't relate to these people. A primer outline:
1. you need money to survive
2. you need more money than 1. to attract a mate and support your offspring
3. you need more money than 2. to compete for status, better mating opportunities, and control of limited resources
N. you need more money than N-1. to compete for status, better mating opportunities, and control of limited resources
Whatever N you are at, there's always an N+1 who bought that private island, or congressman that you wanted for your own purposes. In BP corporate land, the money is very much required to continue to influence legislation that provides them a secure profitable environment in which to operate their enterprise, including throwing enough cash off to all the people they care about to keep them fat, happy, and far up the N scale.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:20PM
You've already answered a good portion of your rant. The Second World War and the Cold War were trials of capitalism and democracy which they passed. But you want yet another trial because you are lousy with diseased ideology.
Let's review some of the dumber claims. First, there is no blind worship of wealth and prosperity. There is no unrestrained greed. These are purely imaginary. There were at least a billion more hungry people in 1970, depending on the counting (for example, here [ourworldindata.org]), than there are now (and that's with the doubling of human population since!) yet we didn't have said "trial". And the melting of the ice caps would be over centuries, if not several millennia. Humanity can easily adapt to the loss of Florida and other low lying territory over that long a time span. Finally, I doubt you've thought much about those time spans of the future, if you don't even understand the present, oh, Mr. Short Term Thinker. Assuming they'll be bad is not thinking.
As to "#ExxonKnew", read the actual summary of their research rather than the propaganda hype. All they concluded was that AGW could be a problem in the future. Oh. Em. Gee. It's just more fake eco-drama because a business looked into the consequences of its actions and didn't find anything troubling.
Can we survive? Oh course. We've survived worse as you noted. We've adapted to worse. What's the big deal when the answer is merely "move to higher ground in a few decades or centuries"? Are we going to forget how to move?
And why has "Big Oil" done this? Because we want a prosperous, healthy society with a future more than we want token environmental feelgoods. You can't even be thinking about this a little, if you can't understand what oil gets used for. It's not unrestrained greed that provides me with the freedom of my own personal transportation, for example.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:07AM
Why would you ever hear of them? My take is that every company has some such examples, even the purported conspirators you mention. But you don't see what is missing.