No More Tears
The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson
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4.5 • 39 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An explosive, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from an award-winning investigative journalist
“A damning portrait.”—Associated Press
“A page-turning drama that raises life-or-death questions about the world’s largest healthcare conglomerate.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY AND NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led to this book—a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.
Harris takes us light-years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding the link of Johnson’s Baby Powder to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics that have cost countless lives, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.
Filled with shocking and infuriating but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This hard-hitting exposé from journalist Harris (Hazard) documents scandals and malfeasance by the pharmaceutical conglomerate Johnson and Johnson. He details how for decades, the company squashed negative stories about its baby powder, which contained traces of asbestos that increased users' risk of contracting ovarian cancer, by "threatening media outlets with financial ruin" until a 2015 lawsuit forced the company to pay $2.1 billion in damages. Other misdeeds included marketing its blood thickener ProCrit to anemic cancer patients while hiding data that showed the drug promoted tumor growth; concealing evidence that its metal Pinnacle hip-replacement implants had failure rates many times higher than its plastic competitors and poisoned patients with metal ions; and botching its one-shot Covid vaccine, which conferred weak protection against the virus and was banned in 2024 for causing fatal blood clots. Harris paints the company as an exemplar of the healthcare industry's corruption, contending that it routinely lied to a toothless Food and Drug Administration and effectively paid doctors to prescribe its drugs under the auspices of enlisting their patients in bogus scientific studies. Harris supports his takedown with a mountain of evidence and conveys his findings in scorching prose. The result is a masterpiece of muckraking.
Customer Reviews
Profound
This book was eye opening