Gardiner Harris, a former pharmaceutical industry reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, has accused Johnson & Johnson (J&J) of a pattern of misconduct spanning decades, arguing that the company’s reputation for public service has obscured serious questions about its products, business practices and accountability. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, Harris discussed his book, No llores más, los oscuros secretos de Johnson & Johnson, published in Spanish by Capitán Swing, which examines nine controversies involving the pharmaceutical giant, from asbestos contamination in its iconic talcum powder to the withdrawal of its Covid-19 vaccine.
“Ninguna industria ha sido tan criminal como la farmacéutica” (“No industry has been as criminal as the pharmaceutical industry”), Harris says in the interview, describing the US pharmaceutical sector as one in which companies can repeatedly face allegations of harmful conduct while retaining considerable commercial and political influence. His book presents J&J as a particularly revealing case because, in his assessment, the company combines exceptionally damaging corporate behaviour with an unusually favourable public image.
“This book was a suicide mission. I tried to move away from the subject, but it haunted me,” Harris told El País. Born in Princeton in 1968, he stopped covering pharmaceuticals in 2012, moving first to New Delhi as a correspondent and later to the White House. He left daily journalism in 2019 to write the book, having previously produced reporting that helped lead to a fraud fine against Bristol Myers Squibb and contributed to the passage of the Sunshine Act, which requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose payments to doctors.
One of the book’s central cases concerns J&J’s talcum powder, which has been linked to ovarian cancer in litigation. The company agreed in July to pay $5.5bn, equivalent to €4.83bn, to settle thousands of outstanding claims, according to the figures cited in the interview. Harris regards the settlement as a victory for the company rather than the claimants, arguing that approximately 90,000 women would receive only a few thousand dollars each, while their lawyers would receive 40 per cent of the compensation.
Harris alleges that J&J continued selling its Baby Powder despite concerns about asbestos contamination. He says the company discovered in the 1960s that its most recognisable product was dangerous, arguing that the initial dismissal of the risk was understandable in a period when asbestos was widely used, but that the continued presence of the substance after its removal from other products reflected corporate obstinacy. J&J’s position on product safety was not independently established in the interview.
The book also attributes a substantial share of deaths associated with three major pharmaceutical crises in the United States to J&J’s activities. Harris estimates that the combined toll reaches two million people: approximately 500,000 deaths associated with the opioid crisis, one million deaths, mainly among elderly people, linked in his account to the misuse of antipsychotic medicines such as Risperdal, and 500,000 cancer patients affected by the misuse of erythropoietin, or EPO, a drug used to mitigate the effects of chemotherapy that Harris says could stimulate tumour growth. He acknowledges that the precise contribution of individual manufacturers cannot readily be separated from the wider categories of medicines involved.
Harris says J&J has spent approximately $35bn on litigation since 2013. He argues that the broader US healthcare system allows pharmaceutical companies to exert excessive influence over doctors, regulators, scientific institutions and politicians. Companies can pay doctors directly to promote their products, he says, while financial incentives encourage prescribing and obscure potential conflicts of interest.
He cites J&J’s promotion of metal-on-metal hip implants as an example. According to Harris, the company paid a dozen leading orthopaedic surgeons a total of $15m to travel around the country promoting the devices. Some of those surgeons, he alleges, understood the risks well enough to stop using the implants on their own patients. In another case, he says, oncologists promoting EPO could double their incomes, while approximately 200 academics knew the drug could encourage tumour growth but remained silent.
Regulatory independence is another major concern. Harris argues that a 1992 agreement under the Clinton administration made the US Food and Drug Administration dependent on fees from the pharmaceutical industry, rather than providing the agency with sufficient public funding. He also points to the revolving door between regulators and industry, saying that every FDA commissioner except the most recent had subsequently worked for drug manufacturers. Three of the four prosecutors involved in the Risperdal case, in which no J&J executive was prosecuted, later joined law firms for which the company was a major client, he says.
Harris argues that legal action after harm has occurred is an inadequate substitute for independent oversight. He advocates a system in which medicines receive more rigorous scrutiny after approval, drawing a comparison with aviation, where an independent organisation investigates accidents to reduce conflicts of interest. He says both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency need greater authority and independence, particularly in monitoring products once they enter the market.
The journalist also alleges that J&J has used its advertising power to discourage critical reporting. Some US media organisations, he says, have declined to interview him despite the book appearing on The New York Times bestseller list. He argues that threats to withdraw advertising and the financial pressures facing publishers and news organisations can encourage self-censorship.
J&J did not provide Harris with its account of the allegations during his research, according to the interview. The company issued a statement afterwards but, Harris says, did not specifically deny the claims. Contacted by El País, J&J’s Spanish subsidiary said: “At Johnson & Johnson, we stand behind the safety of our products and remain focused on bringing medical innovation to patients around the world.”
Harris also acknowledges that the company has developed medicines that save lives, including early antiretroviral treatments for HIV/AIDS, although he criticises its refusal to share a patent for generic production in Africa. He says J&J was an ethical company for much of its early history, but argues that its record cannot be assessed solely through its beneficial products.
He remains concerned that exposing corporate misconduct may fuel distrust of science and strengthen anti-vaccine sentiment. His criticism, he says, is directed at industry practices and the institutions responsible for regulating them, rather than at medical science itself.
