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Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

reuters.com

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Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#111

Post by blitzar »

codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

We need a Journal of Medicore Results, or a Journal of Tried it and it Didn't Work.

As with social media and society in general, only the most inflated of headlines gets attention causing the gold rush of hyped up results. Nothing can be published without the hype and hyperbole, which then sets the benchmark for the next round of hype.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#112

Post by AnthonyMouse »

esteth wrote: post #102
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfairness isn't in what happens after they do something wrong, it's in how they structure their operations to begin with. The point of limited liability is so that grandpa can invest in an index fund even if he doesn't understand the inner workings of consumer products manufacturing without having to worry that one of the 500 companies in the index will hire a bad manager and have it wipe out not just that inves…

This is how it works, at least in this case. J&J is liable for the full liabilities of the new child company. The child exists to make sure a pool of at least its current assets exists to split between all claimants. If they’re found to be liable for more than that, then J&J will be liable for it and, if they can’t service that liability, they will have to declare bankruptancy.

> J&J is liable for the full liabilities of the new child company.

Isn't this still J&J the consumer products division rather than J&J the parent company?

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#113

Post by themitigating »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #59
nl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is a class action somehow impossible if they don't declare bankruptcy? Or they can't distribute money as easily as in a class action? The issue is that there might be multiple actions, and compensation might be used up byt the first one (eg, if the company was sent into bankruptcy by the first class action, then subsequent cases would be useless). This is a pretty reasonable argument IMHO. > Further, if your compan…

> Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this? > This seems fairly debatable. To be fair, we might not have some of the drugs many of us are prescribed to us if we just cancelled every company that ever hurt anyone with experimental drugs.

Your use of "cancelled" seems to be an attempt to imply their actions are similar to a comedian using the N word.

People died and they knew their product was dangerous. That's akin to murder.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#114

Post by sacnoradhq »

irjustin wrote: post #14

Scratching the surface on talc, it's difficult to determine what should/should-not be done. Cancer.org has a page on talc[0] and from it: > Studies of personal use of talcum powder have had mixed results, although there is some suggestion of a possible increase in ovarian cancer risk. There is very little evidence at this time that any other forms of cancer are linked with consumer use of talcum powder. > Until more…

The contamination with, and lack of testing for, asbestos is the root cause. The US FDA dropped the ball and J&J knowingly sold a dangerous product.

PS: Pool hand chalk is compressed, low-grade talc powder likely to contain asbestos. Climbing chalk is usually made from MgCO3 so it's probably safe.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#115

Post by themitigating »

kevinventullo wrote: post #90
nl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this approach allows J&J to determine their maximum liability by only spinning off a certain amount to the subsidiary. This is not what they did. To quote Levine's piece: > the box where J&J put its talc claims — could draw at least $61.5 billion from J&J to pay off those claims. The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer bu…

In your heart of hearts, do you really believe that J&J wants to make things right and pay these claimants what they’re owed, or do you think J&J is trying to minimize what they pay out by any means necessary? Note that J&J shareholders likely interpret the latter as their fiduciary duty.

Here's the problem. Who?

The CEO and eveyone near him is rich, they company going out of business won't affect them. I'm sure they'll be able to get high paying jobs. In fact the negative association with this case would have me wanting to move on

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#116

Post by themitigating »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #39
photochemsyn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good way for students facing huge student loan debt to discharge it in bankruptcy (just kidding, I know that's not something the US government would allow for anyone except well-connected corporate lobbyists etc.).

In a classic "what could possibly go wrong" move, long ago the federal government decided that you can't discharge student debt in bankruptcy, because if you could, then no one would lend education money (which is not collateralizable) and fewer people would go to college.

Why wouldn't that apply to any credit that can be dismissed through bankruptcy?

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#118

Post by mike_hearn »

codelord wrote: post #103

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statist…

How do you measure consensus? There are many researchers who claim there's a consensus of whatever they happen to believe, but when counter-examples are pointed out they start No True Scotsmanning ("no real expert believes...").

Health related research is in a much worse state than ML unfortunately. ML suffers from metrics gaming and overfitting but there's probably not much outright fraud? Common estimates are that half of all medical papers are making false claims. This blog post of mine from a few years ago has some quotes from editors of well known medical journals where they express disbelief in their own published research base, and some examples of blatant fraud [0]. And this interview with Marc Andreessen indicates why VCs don't invest into biotech startups much [1]:

I had a conversation with the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur, and I said, “do you really think it’s true that 50-70% of biomedical research is fake?” This is a guy who has spent his life in this world. And he said “oh no, that’s not true at all. It’s 90%.” [Richard laughs]. I was like “holy shit,” I was flabbergasted that it could be 90%.

[...]

I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex.

In the same interview Andreessen references a study [2] that implies most medical/drug research stopped working overnight in the year 2000. The reason being that in that year the US govt started requiring drug trials to pre-register their hypothesis and then evaluate their results relative to that hypothesis i.e. they tried to prevent P-hacking.

We identified all large NHLBI supported RCTs between 1970 and 2012 evaluating drugs or dietary supplements for the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease [...] 17 of 30 studies (57%) published prior to 2000 showed a significant benefit of intervention on the primary outcome in comparison to only 2 among the 25 (8%) trials published after 2000

[0] https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

[1] https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-dea...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#119

Post by boobsbr »

FireBeyond wrote: post #5

Apropos of anything else, J&J's handling of this has been despicable. Creating an entity specifically to pick up all of the related liabilities, picking up those liabilities and then (exact count may be wrong, but it's very close) literally filing for bankruptcy within the space of three days. The Texas two-step, as it's called. > In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management u…

It's a mockery of Justice.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#120

Post by notahacker »

mkagenius wrote: post #97
blincoln wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If indeed the researchers did conceal that the subjects had other exposure to asbestos, that would be pretty bad? It depends. Were the subjects actually exposed in a meaningful way to another source of asbestos, or did the corporate lawyers go fishing through past address history, purchases, etc. and will argue things like "Subject A visited Australia ten years before the study and was in a city where some older st…

> Were the subjects actually exposed in a meaningful way to another source of asbestos, or did the corporate lawyers go fishing through past address history, purchases, etc. Ideally that should be part of the research paper if done diligently, refuting them even before people doubt them.

Sure, but if people carrying out research were required to forensically examine the history of every research participant to the standard of a corporate law firm trying to find an angle to sue them, no research would ever be done.
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