Greg’s Reviews > No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson > Status Update

J & J’s carelessness and mistakes accelerated antivaccination sentiment that would bedevil the United States’ overall anti-Covid efforts and result in countless more unnecessary deaths.

Executives in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries frequently talk about ‘unmet medical needs’ or ‘unmet consumer needs,’ but they’re usually referring to problems unresolved or unaddressed by current drugs or devices. The Prolift issues were caused by the treatment itself. A simple cure would have been to avoid using Prolift.

To be sure, in some cases family members are quietly hoping their elderly relatives die sooner rather than later. In such circumstances, the effects of antipsychotic prescriptions may even be partially welcome. ‘This is euthanasia with plausible deniability,’ said a top FDA official, who insisted on anonymity.

Years of off-label and illegal sales can become retroactively legal if a company eventually gets the agency’s nod for them. There is nothing in the law that justifies such a policy, but it is one that the FDA still stands by. But if you market and sell a drug in a way that remains beyond the bounds of the law, you are indisputably acting illegally with fingers crossed.

The proliferation of specialty publications and eventual rise of the Internet meant patients sometimes knew (or thought they knew) more about their illnesses than doctors. Medical societies and insurers started demanding that doctors follow evidence-based protocols, or what many clinicians derisively referred to as ‘cookbook medicine.’

Indeed, there may be no more litigious company in the world. Between 2010 and 2021, J & J spent $25 billion on litigation. Hundreds of thousands of people have sued the company in recent years, and J & J has often seemed as if it would fight each case one by one.

A consistent theme throughout this book is how unsurprising so many findings were, given previous research—and that the earlier research had been ignored or essentially suppressed by those whose business interests would be impacted by awareness and regulation.