Gardiner Harris is an award-winning investigative journalist whose reporting has reshaped public health policy, exposed corporate misconduct, and held some of the world’s most influential institutions to account. Gardiner spent years at The New York Times as a public health and pharmaceutical reporter and served as a White House, South Asia, and international diplomacy correspondent. Before that, his reporting at The Wall Street Journal helped trigger what was then the largest SEC fine in history, and his investigations into mining conditions earned him the Worth Bingham Prize and the George Polk Award. He has been a Pulitzer finalist, the author of the novel Hazard, and now the author of No More Tears, a landmark exposé of Johnson & Johnson’s decades-long pattern of deception.
Gardiner joined host Robert Glazer on The Elevate Podcast to discuss Johnson & Johnson’s history, its scandals, and why companies fail to meet the promise of their values.
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Listen to the podcast here
Gardiner Harris On The Dark Story Of Johnson & Johnson
Our quote for is from Upton Sinclair, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Our guest, Gardiner Harris, is an award-winning investigative Journalist whose reporting has reshaped public health policy, exposed corporate misconduct, and held some of the world’s most influential institutions to account.
He spent years at the New York Times as a public health and pharmaceutical reporter and served as a White House, South Asia, and international diplomacy correspondent. Before that, Gardiner’s reporting at the Wall Street Journal helped trigger what was then the largest SEC fine in history, and his investigations into mining conditions earned him the Worth Bingham Prize and the George Polk Award. He’s been a Pulitzer finalist, the author of the novel Hazard, and now the author of No More Tears, a landmark exposé of Johnson & Johnson’s decades-long pattern of deception. Gardiner, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.
I’m glad to be here, Robert. Thanks for having me.
Looking Back To Geraldine’s Childhood
I always find it interesting to start with childhood, and particularly maybe with investigative reporters. I’ve had a few on. What was your early life like?
Obviously, something went desperately wrong if I ended up in this place.
Were you sleuthing around school, fundraising drives gone wrong? What got you into this uncovering truth mindset a little bit?
Thanks for having me, Robert. It’s a real good question. I think you have to be angry a little bit at the world. My mother died when I was a kid, and I think it’s the traumatic event that just pisses you off. Actually, she died when we were living in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Johnson & Johnson’s headquarters. I think that event really shaped my life in a lot of ways and you realize the world is not nearly as warm and cozy and fuzzy as you want it to be. I think a lot of investigative correspondents actually have some early trauma that you just end up working through.
I would have thought someone lied to you or you found out something that wasn’t true.
The basic lie being that life is fair and it’s going to be happy. You realize with that trauma, it’s not.
I had David Gelles on and I didn’t ask him that. Maybe I’ll go back and ask him that, but it was a similar question. There wasn’t about anything around her death that was suspicious or anything?
No. She died before EPO was really launched. She got breast cancer and then it spread to her pancreas and as once that happens, you’re done. As in the book, I tell the story of EPO, which is the worst disaster in cancer history, and it’s one almost no one knows about. In some breast cancer circles, people know about bone marrow transplants and how disastrous they were for breast cancer patients, the incredibly painful procedure, thought to be helpful. Finally, a study showed that it actually did far more harm than good.
Lots of people know that story. Almost no one knows the EPO story. That’s deliberate, Robert. Johnson & Johnson has managed to evade accountability in so many of these disasters, in part because so many people were in on the crimes. Nearly the entire cancer community in the United States was in on the EPO disaster. There has been this deliberate anesthesia to wipe out the pain from that disaster and the memory.
Exposing The Safety Hazards Of Coal Mining
Yeah, this didn’t make sense and so I want to understand why things don’t make sense. We’ll get deep into that. I want to go back. Your investigative career began in Appalachia, where you uncovered the deliberate exposure of miners to toxic coal dust. Tell me a little bit about that story and also what deliberate mean in that context, and then how did that experience shape your instincts around companies that you were investigating?
Just before that, I was actually the police reporter in Louisville for the Louisville Courier Journal and I ended up getting the police chief indicted and fired. One of the reasons my editor sent me to Appalachia is the police department’s black bag unit, their intelligence unit, started surveilling me and there were guys with guns all around me.
What had he been doing, the police chief?
He’d been doing quite a lot of things, and like Al Capone, the thing that I caught him on was that he had actually been gathering from his top officers cash campaign contributions for his boss, the judge executive, and Kentucky law forbids cash campaign contributions. I was able to get him like Al Capone on the tax evasions. There were a lot of dirty stuff. There was a lot of dirty stuff going on in that department.
I ended up getting him indicted for it. I ended up getting his successor fired as well for another investigative account. I ended up getting a police officer indicted for rape in a case that they had buried. There were a bunch of cascading things that led the department to really go after me in a frightening way. The newspaper sent me out to hazard because they thought Louisville cops couldn’t pursue me there. They were right.
They just didn’t know what you would find in Eastern Kentucky. They were sending you to Siberia, but it turned out to be something was there.
That something was that basically coal mines, particularly in Eastern Kentucky, which is traditionally non-union, had been cheating on these required tests of dust in the air of coal mines. Obviously, black lung happens because miners spend their lifetime breathing coal dust. Coal dust is dangerous both because it causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, which is black lung, and also because coal dust in the air is explosive. Many of the worst coal mine disasters happen because a little pocket of methane blew up and that small explosion then triggered a much larger explosion in the coal dust.
Mines are supposed to keep this dust down. They’re supposed to take tests, and what I basically did was an investigation showing that the test results that came out of mines were impossibly small. They were 0.1 milligrams of coal dust per deciliter of air, which is basically the amount of dust you would have on a New York City street corner and not even close to the real levels in coal mines. I ended up accusing the sitting governor of the time of committing these felonies, which led to a whole series of other problematic stories. It was basically this conspiracy that was going on throughout coal.
Were they faking the results or were they taking the samples from other places? What were they doing?
They were basically hanging up the testers at the entrance to the mine and not bringing the testers into the mine. The testers would take a sample, but it was a sample essentially of outdoor air, not mine air.
If they had done it properly and it had shown these levels, what was the remedy that they were not willing to do?
This actually had echoes during COVID about all the masks that we wear. Basically NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, found out decades ago that people cannot wear masks or respirators correctly for more than a couple of hours. Why we required elementary school children to wear these things for 7 or 8 hours is just nuts, because of course they couldn’t wear them correctly.
However, because of that discovery, basically the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969 required that coal mines bring down environmental dust levels within the coal mine. You couldn’t just rely on miners to wear masks because they wouldn’t wear them appropriately and, by the way, wouldn’t protect against explosions.
You had to basically use curtains within the mine to direct air toward the active face of the mine, take all that dust out, and then bring it through the return air, in which miners really are not allowed to go. The return air is allowed to be dusty, but the entryway air, in which air is flowing this way, is supposed to be clear of dust. Miners wouldn’t breathe in this air, wouldn’t get chronic obstruction, but setting up all those curtains actually takes time and labor, and that’s expensive.
You said the governor was in it. Was the governor running the mines or it was private industry that didn’t want to pay or it would kill the industry?
The government required these tests, private industry was supposed to take them, but everybody knew that the tests were being faked. This also has echoes within Johnson & Johnson, which is that miners were complicit in their own disaster, because they became persuaded that these mines couldn’t operate profitably and be safe.
This was the only work in town, I’m guessing?
Right, exactly.
It’s like NFL and concussions. At this point, people know it, but they want to get out of dodge and make millions of dollars.
I played football myself and yeah, I’m a little worried about how I’m going to be in my 70s and 80s.
What was the result when you exposed this? Were there any changes?
There were. The state of Kentucky passed a whole series of new mine safety laws requiring better monitoring of dust levels in mines. The federal government, MSHA, which is the Mine Safety and Health Administration, changed a lot of its rules and regulations around the testing levels. I think testing probably improved for a year or two and then I think it went back to the way it was.
Uncovering The Corrupt Practices In Pharmaceutical Industry
I would see this pattern, Robert, throughout my career. I have to say I went to the highest levels of journalism and was able to change the world in a few very big ways and a lot of small ones. I would later do a whole series of stories, for instance, on conflicts of interest in medicine, how drugmakers were paying doctors and how this led doctors to practice dangerous medicine.
How many top academics were lying about the money that they were making, and that led to the passage of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act that requires all drugmakers to disclose publicly the amount of money that they’re paying to physicians. I thought that that law would lead to the end of these practices and that corruption in medicine would end. Didn’t happen.
The commercials to me are amazing. Other countries don’t let drug companies market.
New Zealand does. Us and New Zealand.
Are they the only two? I’m watching these ads and it’s like, “You should be calling your doctor,” and my kids are always like, “What is up with the side effects?” It seems so strange that everyone’s going in telling the doctors what medicine they want these days. It seems so strange.
Remember, Robert, if you watch the evening news, of course, every ad is a drug ad. It looks like, “They’re spending huge amounts of money.” Drugmakers spend ten times as much in their marketing directly to doctors, and they spend multiples just in giving cash payments to doctors plus the food, plus the nice trips. For all of those ads, just remember that is a fraction of the amount of money that they are throwing at your doctor.
Drugmakers spend ten times as much on their marketing directly to doctors. They spend multiples just in giving cash payments to doctors, plus the food and the nice trips.
I knew someone years ago doing speaking for a company and he got we were on a trip and he got pushed by another friend and he was like, “No, look, they don’t ask me to do anything and whatever.” Soon after, they did and he stopped doing it and I gave him credit for it, but there was always an ask.
There’s always an ask. Doctors are completely delusional about this and they wouldn’t pay you any money. They know exactly you’re prescribing. They get these weekly prescription updates for every doctor in the country and if you don’t change your prescribing habits after they give you money, they stop giving you money.
Personal Encounter With An J&J Sales Rep
The old Charlie Munger, one of my favorite quotes, I’m sure you’ve used it. “Show me the incentive and I’ll tell you the behavior.” Your new book, No More Tears. I know the origin actually traces back to a chance encounter with a J&J sales rep at an airport bar. What was it about this story that made you realize like you should dig in and it was far more systemic?
Robert, because I’m thickheaded, there were actually several origins. The first origin was when I joined the beat. As you might remember, AIDS in Africa was the big issue. The United States had miraculously and gloriously created these arvs, these antiretroviral drugs, in the late 1990s which, when you put a cocktail of them together, made AIDS instead of a death sentence, a chronic illness.
The infection was sweeping across Africa, which is where it started, but these drugs were way too expensive for Africa. You might remember there were concerts all over the world to try to pay for this treatment in Africa but everybody realized that this would only happen if generic companies could make these and bring them to Africa.
After a lot of stories that I wrote and a lot of my colleagues wrote saying this had to happen, every AIDS drugmaker in the world agreed to allow Indian drugmakers to copy their drugs to sell it in Africa and the price of these antiretrovirals, when they came down to $1 a day, the world realized that they could save Africa. Obviously, George Bush created the PEPFAR program, which has saved something like 35 million people, none of which would have been possible if the drug companies had not allowed their products to be copied essentially for free.
All of the companies agreed to this with the exception of Johnson & Johnson. I was disbelieving. I’d grown up in Princeton, Johnson & Johnson’s supposed to be the most ethical company and wait a second, alone amongst all AIDS drugs manufacturers, they’re the ones who said no, you’re not going to copy our drug? Now it didn’t make that big of a deal because there were so many other drugmakers who did agree to it, that Johnson & Johnson’s holdout didn’t have a profound effect, but still for me, it was just like, “Wait, what?”
My son was born in 2003, he spent several days in a NICU unit which, if anyone has been through this, is among the worst things that will happen to you in your lifetime. Your child is born, fabulous, amazing thing and then something happens and he winds up in the NICU unit, it is the worst thing. We got our child home, he recovered nicely.
A few days later, I got all these records showing that Johnson & Johnson had this illegal marketing program for a heartburn drug called Propulsid in which they sold Propulsid to NICU doctors so that they would treat these preemie infants with NICU to hopefully they said prevent spit-up amongst these preemie infants. Johnson & Johnson knew two things solidly about Propulsid. One, it didn’t work in these infants. The company had undertaken twenty separate clinical trials, all of which had failed.
How’d they get approval or was this off-label promotion?
Completely off-label, illegal marketing program. In fact, they created this cherry-flavored liquid version of Propulsid which they told the FDA was for seniors who couldn’t swallow. In fact, more than 90% of its sales were for these preemie infants. Again, they shouldn’t have been able to do a fourth clinical trial in children and infants because as children and infants are protected class. You can only do clinical trials if you have very good reasons to believe that your drug or your device is helpful. After the third failed clinical trial, they no longer had that reason, but they nonetheless not only did a fourth clinical trial, 5th, 10th, even a 20th, all of them failed. They knew solidly.
Your son was prescribed this in the NICU?
No, my son wasn’t, but he’d been in the NICU, I saw that they had this drug, had this illegal marketing program, and the drug not only didn’t work but had this rare fatal side effect in infants, because it caused a heart arrhythmia that in preemies is particularly deadly. There was this growing pile of dead babies and Johnson & Johnson continued this marketing program despite knowing that it killed infants.
It was an illegal program, they knew it didn’t work, they knew in rare cases it killed these kids, but they decided that the money was too good to stop. I just was like, “I cannot even believe this.” A year later, as I say in the book, I met this woman in an airport bar who told me a just as difficult story about the effects of Risperdal, their antipsychotic in children.
Was she drinking? Why does she start telling you? Presumably she’s like making money off this stuff. Obviously, she was in a bar, an airport bar, but why did she start spilling her guts and did she know you were an investigative reporter?
She did. We were both in this bar. We were actually watching a March Madness game. Her favorite team was on the TV, I think it was Mississippi State. When I started watching, it was like right around halftime. Her team was way up and then they collapsed and got crushed. I think she was just in a terrible emotional state, let’s say. We were also drinking and this was back in the day that’s really hard to remember Robert, where before social media, before you could track people down on, like back in the day when you would talk to strangers.
I don’t know how much it’s changed, but generally all the reps were young attractive females. That was the protocol.
Exactly. She was a young attractive, little less than young, she’d been there for a while but she was certainly attractive and had been doing this for a while and of course told me the story about how her nephew had gotten in a fight. By the way Robert, I got into fights all the time in elementary school and I think if I’d gone to school 30 years later, I totally would have gotten drugged.
Back when I was a kid, getting in fights was just normal and now, it’s like forget it. Anyway, her nephew got in a fight. To not be expelled, he had to go see a psychiatrist. She was this drug rep for child psychiatrists. She was selling Risperdal to child psychiatrists even though that was illegal. She was able to get him an appointment right away. Anybody who’s tried to get an appointment with a child psychiatrist knows that.
She is probably being incentivized and compensated to prescribe something off-label for which it is not approved.
Right. Everyone she visits as a drug sales rep is a child psychiatrist. At this point, Risperdal does not have a pediatric indication, so everything about her job is illegal. By the way, the company would eventually plead guilty to criminal charges around its marketing for Risperdal. I’m not telling you something that Johnson & Johnson hasn’t admitted to.
Anyway, she’s visiting child psychiatrists, trying to get them the prescribed this drug, again, entirely illegally. Her nephew gets in a fight, has to see a psychiatrist, and because she has these relationships she’s able to get him into see this psychiatrist almost immediately, an appointment that would normally, anybody who’s tried to get a child psychiatrist appointment, knows that it takes you months to get in to see these people. They are way overbooked.
Her sister’s incredibly grateful, and her nephew goes in and sees this psychiatrist who then prescribes the kid Risperdal, an antipsychotic, the drug that she is detailing, that she’s selling to all these psychiatrists. She knows that this drug is serious medicine. Antipsychotics are recommended for schizophrenia because they reduce hallucinations. They’re really the only thing that will quiet the voices in schizophrenics. They are also recommended for serious bipolar illness to treat that.
Beyond that, their risks and side effects are so profound that they really shouldn’t be used in almost anyone but with the most serious psychiatric illnesses because they cause uncontrolled facial movements and tics like flypaper tongue. When you watch Batman and you see the Joker going like that, it’s not because crazy people naturally have tics. It’s because the treatment for craziness leads them to develop these uncontrollable facial tics.
These are serious drugs, they also cause weight gain. The average weight gain of children on Risperdal is more than one pound a week. You do six months of treatment and that’s 24 pounds just from that drug. Kids blow up like balloons. Adults do as well. Her nephew gets prescribed this she tells her sister, “Before you start that, let’s think about this,” but it’s already too late. Her sister started a kid on the drug. As a lot of these psychiatric medicines, they have on-ramps but they don’t really have off-ramps. It’s really easy to start, it’s really hard to stop.
There’s some secondary side effect for which they give you another drug.
Exactly. The kid gets on this drug, blows up like a balloon, won’t go to the pool with her favorite aunt anymore because he’s embarrassed about it and by the way, the really bad side effect that’s unique to Risperdal is that 10% of boys given this drug grow breasts. Breasts are permanent tissue. Once you grow a breast as a boy, you will never not have breasts unless you have a surgical procedure, double mastectomy, to have them removed. Of course, as any woman who’s gone through this process, that’s a terrible invasive procedure that takes you months to get over. A lot of parents, since these kids are vulnerable already, don’t really want to go through this.
How Johnson & Johnson Made Bad Look Like Good
Take me through the psyche here of someone at Johnson & Johnson. Does someone believe this can help or do good? These risks are massive. Is this just pure greed and profit? Does it come up in a marketing lab or does someone have a basis to believe that this could help people and they look the other way? I’m just trying to understand the genesis of something like that.
Before I answer that question, I just want to tell people that my book is about nine separate products. I start with Johnson’s baby powder and its long-term contamination with asbestos. I go to Tylenol, which we’ll talk about. I talk about EPO, a cancer drug, Risperdal, this antipsychotic, their role in the opioids crisis which arguably is much worse than that of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma, and then metal-on-metal hip implants, vaginal mesh, and the COVID vaccine.
I also talk about a contraceptive known as Ortho Evra. In each case of course Johnson & Johnson lies about how effective the products are and fails to disclose the often deadly risks. The result, by the way, I estimate, is 2 million American deaths. Arguably, there are very few human organizations in history that have been more deadly than Johnson & Johnson.
They were the principal cause of the opioid crisis, 500,000 deaths. They were the principal cause of the antipsychotic crisis, more than 1 million deaths, they were the principal cause of the EPO crisis, more than 500,000 deaths. More deaths than have happened in all of America’s wars combined. The question that I get asked all the time is how could all these relatively good people go along. These are the largest costliest and deadliest criminal conspiracies in American history. Nothing else is close. One of the things that Johnson & Johnson that I write about, Johnson & Johnson arguably its great excellence is in gaslighting its own employees to go along with these criminal schemes. That’s what the book really tries to unpack, Robert.
Johnson & Johnson arguably excels in gaslighting its own employees so they would get along with the company’s criminal schemes.
We talk a lot about the show about good culture. One reason why to have you on what happens what does culture look like when it’s bad? Is that top-down is that from the founders? Is that generation to generation? Is it in there from the beginning or was there a genetic mutation at some point?
Definitely a genetic mutation. I think there is really good evidence that Johnson & Johnson, through most of the 20th century up through the 1960s, was truly one of the most ethical companies around. Robert Wood Johnson II, the founding family member of the company, his father and his uncles actually founded it but he’s the one who really brought it to great prominence and success. He had these whole factories, beautiful campaign. He really believed in making sure their facilities were sparkling clean.
He did the right thing again and again. His death in 1968 really is the turning point for the company. At that point, the company starts realizing that its iconic baby powder is contaminated with asbestos. They start doing things to hide that. They just then really get into the drug business in a huge way. They start hiding drug risks.
After Robert Wood Johnson II’s death, the company starts down a darker path and then by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when by then the evidence is crystal clear that asbestos is deadly in even microscopic tiny amounts. The company really takes a very dark turn. Once you decide that you’re going to sell a contaminated powder for the nation’s babies and mothers, you’ll do almost anything.
How Tylenol Found Its Way Into The Baby Powder
How did asbestos get into this? This is what I don’t understand. The Tylenol thing was after this so again, they made one right decision in that that wasn’t profit driven. How did industrial asbestos get into baby powder?
Talc as has been used as a cosmetic for millennia. It’s it was the first skin whitener. By the way, I was the South Asia correspondent for the New York Times so I lived in India and in places like India, the biggest selling cosmetics are skin whiteners. Talc has served that purpose for a very long time. It’s also the softest mineral on earth. It’s known as soapstone when it’s in blocks and when you grind soapstone up into a powder, it’s so soft that it actually feels like oil in your fingers.
Johnson & Johnson originally started using it because they sold in the late 19th century things called medicated plasters. These were the band-aids of the of the old age and they were like somewhere between casts and bandages and they would infuse these medicated plasters with capsaicin and belladonna to encourage healing.
However, capsaicin, which is in chili, also causes skin irritation. They started sending out with their medicated plasters these little tins of Italian talc just to soothe the irritated skin. People just started asking for the talc and they realized that this could be a really good opportunity. They were a wholesale hospital supply company, mostly bandages, and then they used the talc to really enter the personal care market. They started selling Johnson’s baby powder. It was really the first great franchise.
That stuff was put on me after every bath as a kid. I just remember growing up with that all over.
It wasn’t really until the 1950s that Johnson & Johnson realized that along with talc, you always get a little bit of asbestos. Talc and asbestos are basically chemically identical and they grow up in the same veins. Every asbestos mine has a little bit of talc running through it because in order to get asbestos or talc, you only have slight variations in temperature and pressure.
As it’s basically impossible to permanently separate these things and that and the FDA has now declared this and they put out all kinds of statements that said, “You have to assume that any powdered talc has got asbestos in it.” IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, all of these various cancer organizations have now come to the same conclusion, which is whenever you have talc you’re going to have asbestos. For decades, basically, Johnson & Johnson, even though they knew this, denied it. Basically, nearly half of all infants through much of the 20th century had their bottoms dusted with talc. Women not only used it on their children but they used it on themselves.
It was also mostly a lot for private parts, too.
Exactly, because Johnson & Johnson infused baby powder with this very strong scent that actually, according to their own surveys, became the most recognized scent in the world and in fact, as the brain’s limbic center.
I can smell it as you say it. As you say it, I can envision where I was as a little kid.
Executives, actually, for decades, always started their speeches the same way. They always said, “When I say Johnson’s baby powder, how many of you can just smell it?” the whole room would smile and light up, almost as if they’d been hypnotized. Everything that the executives then said had this extremely receptive audience because smell leads to an emotional response which leads to trust.
Johnson & Johnson knew this. One of the questions that I so often had is how did the company get away with so many of these criminal operations? I essentially argue in the book that Johnson & Johnson was a criminal organization for much of its history. Mafia families get a larger share of their revenue from purely illegal things.
How Johnson & Johnson Gaslight Their Employees To Do Their Will
You say gaslighting before? This is the opposite of coal. How do you get presumably good people to look the other way or make harmful decisions?
Let me say, I was never able to get into really the heads of a lot of these people. I only talk about what they did. Let me speculate a little bit and this has been an endless project of mine. I don’t have a solid answer. My belief is that Johnson & Johnson created this belief system within the company based upon the 1982 poisoning episode, based upon this credo. They had this mission statement which was really the grandfather of all mission statements.
It’s first do no harm, basically.
They talked about this mission statement endlessly. What they basically got their employees to believe is that Johnson & Johnson was a uniquely beneficial force in the world, that it saved lives. Obviously, it has long been the largest, most profitable healthcare product company on the planet. They got their employees to really buy into this notion that Johnson & Johnson’s mission and focus is saving lives.
I think what the mental gymnastics and calculus was that they got their employees often to do things they knew were bad with their particular product, but they justified it in their head by saying, “We might be doing this little bad thing over here, but Johnson & Johnson is overall such a great company that in the grand scheme of things, if that’s what this company needs to survive, I’m okay with that and I’ll go along with this.”
I will tell you this, Robert. One of the fascinating things for me was when I came into this industry and I became the principal industry reporter, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, I initially came in, the same thing happened when I was a cop reporter, by the way. I came in to the cop beat thinking, “This group of people are the good guys, this group of people are the bad guys.” It turned out I was completely wrong. This group of people around the police chief turned out to be totally bad guys. The outliers who were complaining about them turned out to be completely right and the good guys.
The same thing happened to me in pharma. When I first came in, I had this mental moral hierarchy. I’m a Christian. I go to church almost every weekend. Jesus Christ really is my savior. I can say that out loud. These moral issues have a real resonance in my life. I believe that researchers in the industry were like researchers in academia. Everybody was on the same page trying to cure disease, and the executives were somewhere in the middle, and the worst were the sales reps who would do anything to get doctors to prescribe their drugs and make it make more money because, as they’re incentivized.
Healthcare sales reps are the worst. They would do anything to get doctors to prescribe their drugs and make more money.
That was the assumption stack.
That was my assumption going in. You see all these movies.
The salespeople, the guys and the research people are bad.
It turns out it’s completely different. It’s the salespeople who were inevitably all the whistleblowers in the hundreds of criminal cases. It was never the researchers, even though the researchers had the education to calculate down to the decimal point the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who will be killed by the company’s illegal marketing schemes.
Why No Whistleblowers Came Out Of The Research Cohort
Do you have a theory as to why no whistleblowers came out of the research cohort?
Yeah. You go to medical school not because you’re brave. You go to medical school to have an assurance of a good and easy life for yourself and your kids. It is extremely rare to find courageous people who have mds. I’m sorry to tell you this. They didn’t want to rock the boat because it would’ve rocked their comfortable world.
Did leadership was asking them for that data? I’m still trying to figure out the origin source of is someone’s like, “We need to make more money,” or someone leadership runs with something they discovered or the leadership’s asked them to prove something and they fudge the numbers.
Each one of the products, as you go through the book, it took me five years to write this book so I have thousands of documents. Many of those documents, by the way, I have Grand Jury files. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, these organizations I work for, Fox News, none of them have ever had a single Grand Jury file for at least 50 years as far as I know. I have scores of Grand Jury files from three separate Grand Juries and having that evidence is the only way that I could get away with accusing the company of this many deaths because the lawyers simply wouldn’t have allowed me to do that.
In each one of these cases, you get essentially the company from the top has these sales goals and these are the goals that they basically have to reach. By the way, the people they hire, Alex Gorsky, the CEO of the company went to West Point and was an army officer and a huge share of the people hired into Pharma during these years are former military officers who you know are taught to salute and just follow orders.
We’re seeing it now in the blowing up of these boats in the Caribbean, despite the fact that they may actually be illegal. I think that’s what these companies were looking for. They were looking for people who wouldn’t ask many questions and would go along. The other thing that happens here and I’m very critical of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in this book. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is gaslighting us all throughout this period of time by describing the FDA as this very tough enforcer of rules, when in fact, the FDA has become entirely captive to the industry it regulates because the FDA’s budget is now largely underwritten by industry fees.
Corrupt companies are always looking for people who do not ask many questions and are easy to go along with.
It’s not an accident that I have not gotten a review in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and the FT said that my book was one of the best 15 books of 2025. Amazon called my book the best non-fiction book of 2025. I didn’t even make the top 100 list in the New York Times list. That I was told right before the book was published, “You go after these companies, it’s going to cost you, Gardiner. It’s going to cost you in sales, it’s going to cost you in reviews and all that.” I said, “I don’t care.” It’s clear that the top-notch media played a role in a lot of this by allowing Johnson & Johnson to get away with it. I took the hit.
It probably becomes the top book along when mckinsey comes to town in in Business School ethics classes going forward.
I would hope so, but here’s the thing, Robert. I predict that these schools may adopt this initially, but at some point, in the next few years, Johnson & Johnson is going to come to each one of these schools and say, “We’d love to give you a grant, but only if you decide to stop teaching this one particular book.” they will succeed because this is what they do.
The reason I did this book is that I felt covering all of the pharma companies, I covered them all, I knew them all, I knew the ceos of every major pharma company. We all agreed, including executives from other companies, that Johnson & Johnson, on the one hand, had by far the best reputation. They led all the surveys of the most admired companies in this space. On the other hand, they were by far the worst behaved.
That contradiction, how is it that you have this great reputation on the one hand and these terrible, criminal, deadly behaviors on the other? That was the fundamental mystery that I wanted to unpack. How did this happen? The people who wanted me to write this the most were my friends in other companies because it made them crazy because they could see how Johnson & Johnson behaved.
One of the things, by the way, in the Risperdal story, I have the records from the Risperdal Grand Jury and I have the records from the Zyprexa Eli Lilly Grand Jury. These are competing similar drugs. One of the things that comes out of the Zyprexa Eli Lilly, what both companies found out about the same time that they were in being investigated for criminal behavior. They shouldn’t have been told but they have great intelligence networks. These should have been secret these cases.
Anyway, Eli Lilly calls in the executive who’d been in charge of these criminal schemes and they fire him on the spot. They escort him out of the building. He never darkens their door again. Johnson & Johnson made that guy their CEO. That’s why this book is not a pharma book, it’s a Johnson & Johnson book. It is Johnson & Johnson’s culture that is so bad.
There were a lot of people who were probably a little bit racist who voted for Obama and then they used that as a like, “Look, I’m not racist. I voted for this guy,” and then they go back to their racist activities. It seems like the Tylenol thing happened in the middle of this and maybe even they all convinced themselves, “We did the right thing. We’re the good guys.” They rode that horse and every business school will case study that.
There’s a famous Harvard Business School case study about the 1982 Tylenol poison that is to this day taught at every business school with the exception of Harvard. Harvard no longer teaches that case study and the reason is that I have friends at Harvard Business School, I believe this is the reason. I told them that this book was coming out. Let’s be clear Harvard has created more than twenty case studies about Johnson & Johnson, all of them are hagiographic like this is the greatest company since Jesus walked the Earth and all of them are spectacularly, disastrously wrong, including that 1982 case study.
Remember the famous airplane interview? I grew up on the Jack Welch airplane interview when it was the most brilliant leadership succession program ever. Those guys went on to ruin a generation of companies, including Boeing. All this stuff needs to age a little bit whether you find out it’s vinegar or good wine.
A great thing about being a reporter is how often, if you stick around for a while, you are proven wrong disastrously. You write the first draft of history and that first draft turns out to be it’s a good thing it’s just the first draft.
PR works. PR covers up a lot of sins and Johnson & Johnson, in the 1982 topic, just one little data point. It is almost certain, we don’t know this for certain but it’s 99% likely that Johnson & Johnson was bribing the FDA commissioner at the time. This guy, his name was Dr. Arthur Hayes, he eventually was dismissed because he was taking payments from some unknown drugmaker. He then spent the next twenty years working on behalf of Johnson & Johnson.
You put two and two together, it’s likely Johnson & Johnson and it was really the FDA commissioner in 1982 who blessed this notion that Johnson & Johnson’s actions were unusually beneficial and ethical. There were lots of things that Johnson & Johnson did during that poisoning that was far from beneficial and ethical.
However, this Harvard Business School case study has cemented this nonsense notion about this wonderful response and that, as you said, had become this ethical shield that allowed the company to do all kinds of truly criminal action, by the way, bribing Saddam Hussein’s regime is among them, bribing the Mahdi Army. The number of criminal guilty pleas that Johnson & Johnson has pledged to over the decades is almost impossible to count up because they were so good at hiding them, using the names of subsidiaries and all that stuff. One of them was that they pleaded guilty to criminal charges of bribing Saddam Hussein’s regime. It just goes on and on from here.
Tylenol: A Not-So Beneficial Drug
Their reputation is still pretty good, all these things considered, for those who haven’t read your book. I’m going to ask you three questions that you’re uniquely qualified to ask and I’m going to make this apolitical. I’m just going to say the presidential administration comes to you, and it’s any administration because I think you’re in a good place to solve these three things. I have three things. The first one is Tylenol. Is it good, is it bad? What do we do with it? What’s your answer on that?
Tylenol’s a terrible drug.
This is acetaminophen overall you’re saying?
Yeah, overall. It causes more death and injury than all other over-the-counter medicines combined. That is no doubt. I have a whole section on Tylenol. The reason we think it’s safe is because it came up in the 1960s and ‘70s when ulcers were this terrible public health crisis and unlike all other nsaids including aspirin it doesn’t worsen ulcers.
It kills your liver.
Once we discovered that ulcers are caused by H. Pylori bacteria and you just can take an antibiotic, Tylenol wouldn’t be approved now. It’s not crazy that Tylenol might be linked with autism.
Do you think the administration is not far off in some of its criticisms of Tylenol?
No. Is it proven? No, but drug warnings never come from proven links. There has not been a single major drug warning issued in the last 50 years because some study showed a causal link. These inference studies are well enough to put a warning. If I had a friend who was pregnant right now, I’d say, “Look, unless you get a really bad fever, it’s a really bad idea to take acetaminophen. Try to avoid it.” by the way, 70% of pregnant women take acetaminophen at some point in their pregnancy but only 5% to 6% do it because of a fever. For the vast majority of them, they’re doing it for standard aches and pains and acetaminophen is terrible at curing standard aches and pains.
The Cochrane Review, which is the great adjudicator of medical benefit, has found that it’s really no better than a placebo. Why are you taking a placebo that might actually have a problematic effect on your infant? It makes no sense. I think the Trump administration warning was understandable. Tylenol, stay away from it.
Certainly, the FDA signaled this, by the way. Prescription Tylenol, you can only get a 350 mg pill. That is the maximum prescription dose. Extra strength Tylenol has 500 mg in it. It is the only medicine where the over-the-counter dose is higher than the prescription dose and that’s because the FDA has basically very little power over over-the-counter medicines once they’re approved. I tell people you should not have extra strength Tylenol in your medicine cabinet.
You should not have extra strength Tylenol in your medicine cabinet.
How The Pandemic Revealed Healthcare’s Incentive Problem
All right, so that’s number one. Number two, we talked about there’s an incentive problem in a lot of these things but there’s also an institutional problem. You mentioned COVID and what is amazing to me is that 4 years later, 5 years later after this thing, we have no independent study, we have no agreement on what we got right on what we got wrong, which I thought scientists were supposed to happen. If it happened again tomorrow, I think it’d be a disaster because no one’s going to listen to anyone.
There was a lot of trust the science and you’re telling me a lot of these scientists all lied or covered up stuff. I actually get that we made some decisions in the middle of a pandemic that weren’t right. I think that’s fine but without the scientific or the medical. There’s different policies made on the same science and the problem is science changed and some policies didn’t, but there seems to be a complete failure of the scientific community which is a little more left-leaning. I thought scientists were supposed to come out and say, “These things prove this. Here’s what we learned.” No one has the courage, as I think you said before, to do this.
The Trump administration definitely gets things wrong, particularly in the world of public health. RFK’s battle on basic childhood vaccines is really misplaced. The reason why Bhattacharya is the head of NIH is that he tried to hold a conference at Stanford of lessons learned during COVID. I actually participated in his conference because I thought it was the right thing to do. No left leaning reporters or researchers agreed to participate. I think this is a huge mistake.
We had a 9/11 Commission. We had 3,000 deaths. We had a million deaths and we haven’t had a commission and I could see them saying, “At the time, we told people to wear these masks because it was chaos, but we were wrong and so we wouldn’t do it again or do we have kids stay home or not stay home?
It is clear. I don’t know where I am on the spectrum I think I’m in the middle. Let’s be clear that red state governors were absolutely right in retrospect about keeping schools open as early as possible and blue state governors were clearly wrong. Schools were not vectors of transmission. Kids were not particularly in danger from COVID and what we have subsequently seen is this enormous effect on the educational opportunities and educational achievement of kids from these blue states where schools were closed for a year and two years.
My sons being affected most terribly. We were in a blue state and my son didn’t get to go back to high school for nearly two years. It’s nuts. The requirements in places like New York City for elementary schools kids to continue to wear masks for three years after COVID first broke out, again, nuts. Even my colleagues at the New York Times did a bunch of stories on how masks were beneficial. Those were all mechanistic stories. Those were all based on mechanistic findings.
N95s or whatever, probably, but the cloth masks were all useless.
All useless. Even the N95.
The good thing is I blocked it out. I have them in my closet, I can tell you that.
Even those for kids, again, there were all these studies that as we talked about and NIOSH had talked about for a long time showing that people cannot wear masks for longer than an hour or two hours effectively. It’s just not possible. You’re expecting some six-year-old to wear an N95 in a protective way for 7 or 8 hours in a school day it’s a joke. We knew this at the time and yet as we know, this orthodoxy took hold in the left-leaning public health community and left-leaning places like the New York Times that said, “This is the way we got to go.” It was wrong. I think one of the reasons they don’t want to revisit this is they don’t want to revisit their mistakes.
I always thought the scientific method was that a mistake excited you or disproving a theory excited you because it strengthened your theory.
Not in this case. Unfortunately, it is the political dynamic that we’re in that we are so divided now that neither side particularly wants to revisit their mistakes.
If we have something with a transmission level of COVID but a higher fatality rate that the risk-reward spectrum is changed. I don’t think anyone’s going to listen to anyone.
Yeah, it’s a real problem. By the way, again, there’s blame to go around on all sides, but I covered the CDC for years and a huge mistake that Rochelle Walensky and other CDC leaders decided to make was to centralize communication in the director’s office with her. In the old days, when they had scientific issues, they would call reporters down to Atlanta and we would hear from panels of scientists discussing the science. Many times, those scientists, their messages were muddled because the science was muddled. They would say, “Well, we know this, but we don’t know that, and we’re not sure.”
That is better to say than to than to be overly absolute about something that you’re not sure.
Exactly, when they turned out to be wrong and those absolute reassurances. Rochelle Walensky decided from the get-go that she would centralize the COVID communications, she would be the one to talk about it and she would be blandly and overly reassuring. Initially, of course, as the thinking was that these vaccines would protect you against all subsequent infection.
That proved to be wrong, and because they gave these general bland reassurances, people could point to those earlier statements and say, “You were completely wrong,” whereas if they had allowed the actual scientists to give briefing to reporters in the way they used to, then people wouldn’t have been able to point to these single statements.
As we said before, you can make totally different policy based on the same data. Some of it is a subjective. I’m making a guess based on this.
As you saw, Sweden decided to do something completely different than Norway. We saw this internationally, which was completely different than Australia and a lot of these countries ended up in the same place. Now that we’re on COVID, remember in my Risperdal chapter, near the end, Risperdal kills you by doing two things. It makes you far more susceptible to heart attack and stroke. It makes you far more susceptible to respiratory infections.
Why were American nursing homes such a killing zone during COVID? Could it be because a huge share of American nursing home residents are being given antipsychotics inappropriately that makes them far more susceptible to respiratory infection? What’s COVID? COVID is a respiratory infection. This criminal behavior by Johnson & Johnson around Risperdal actually has these echoes decades later and may be the reason why COVID was so uniquely deadly in American nursing homes.
Two Important Problems To Address In Healthcare
The last one is Gardiner, you are appointed again by this neutral non-triggering administration as the restoring faith in healthcare czar in in America. Based on what you’ve seen and the incentives and the decision-making, what would be your five-point plan on what healthcare companies should and should not be allowed to do and how they interface with doctors and patients and all kinds of things to restore trust, basically?
At the end of the book, I have like a seven-point plan but I’ll just give you the top two highlights. One is drug companies should not be allowed to pay doctors. Not one of these disasters took place in Europe, not the opioid crisis, not the antipsychotic crisis, and not the EPO crisis, because it’s illegal to pay doctors in Europe. It’s not illegal for drug companies to make doctors part-time sales reps. That is crazy.
Drug companies should not be allowed to pay doctors.
I did a series of stories that led to the development of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act that requires disclosure of these payments but even disclosing them has not stopped them. The industry to this day gives $2 billion to $3 billion a year to your doctor. Of course, every study that has ever been done on this practice shows that it makes doctors worse at their jobs, not better. That needs to stop.
The federal government, the biggest payer of healthcare expenses, needs to put out a rule that says, “In three years, if you take money from drugmakers, you will not be allowed to treat any patient on Medicare and Medicaid.” If they did that, it would stop all across the board and you would be safer because you don’t know that your doctor is taking money to treat you badly and that is a fact. Doctors don’t like to recognize it in themselves but it’s going to go on. That needs to stop.
The second thing is that the FDA, we need in drugs and devices what we have in in in airplane crashes. The FAA approves airplanes but when airplanes crash, everybody knows that the FAA has this conflict because they proved it so you have the NTSB come in and investigate the crashes. It’s this independent NTSB that had nothing to do with the approval.
I didn’t I know that but I didn’t realize that they’re intentionally separate bodies. By the way, the FAA blew it with Boeing because of all sorts of incentive crap.
Huge way. We all know that and the FAA agreed to it and Boeing pleaded guilty to criminal charges now the Trump administration has come in and thrown all that out because they don’t believe in going after corruption. We need that in drugs and devices. Sure, the FDA can continue to approve these medicines and devices but once they are approved, we need an entirely independent agency maybe nestled in Medicare because that’s the big spender that will track how well these drugs and devices actually work in patients.
We have enormous sums of data that the FDA largely doesn’t even look at that show this is what electronic medical records provide us. We can see how well people do on this device or how well they do on this drug. Does it kill them or does it keep them alive? No one is looking at that, which is nuts. That’s because FDA wants nothing to do with it because if they actually found and there are several people that are called pharmacoepidemiologists in FDA and they’ve basically been locked up in a basement there where FDA wants nothing to do with any of their work.
Originally, when I first started covering the FDA, I could talk to those people and eventually, FDA banned everyone from talking to them because FDA doesn’t want to know. FDA doesn’t want you to know how dangerous these products are once they reach the marketplace. That would mean they made a mistake earlier which they don’t want to admit to. As we just said, public health officials don’t like admitting to mistakes.
That is a problem. There are a lot of leaders reading this show who probably believes that their values are strong and their organizations are principled. What signs should executives look for in their culture that may be drifting into blind spots that you’ve found at J&J?
First of all, I think the whole mission statements nonsense needs to stop. It becomes this gaslighting exercise. It’s just nonsense. Let’s be clear and honest. Johnson & Johnson’s mission statement says they put doctors and patients first. It’s utter nonsense.
They put doctors first. They pay them.
Let’s just stop the nonsense and the gaslighting because it can lead you to very dark places. The other things is it’s sort of amazing to me the number of people. I got all these grand jury files, which had these employee rosters in them, including cell phones. I was able to call hundreds and hundreds of employees out of the blue and say, “I’m Gardiner Harris. I’m writing a book. Talk to me about your experience.” The vast majority of these people wouldn’t put their name to it. I ended up having amazing conversations with people about the process they went through when the scales gradually fell from their eyes.
So many of them were gaslighted. So many of them bought the mythology of Johnson & Johnson. For so many of them, waking up from that dream was a nightmare and caused them all kinds of real problems. I’ll never forget talking to this one guy who was himself a former West Point graduate and saw himself as this incredibly ethical person. He went into Johnson & Johnson a teetotaler, never drank. Came out of Johnson & Johnson a complete drunk with his marriage failing, his whole life collapsing around him.
It’s probably because he knew he was compromising his values everyday.
Exactly. In his subsequent jobs, he would go in to the boss and give this impassioned speech. “I just want you to know, I am not going to break the law for you.” The bosses, of course, would be like, “Yeah, we’re good with that. You don’t have to actually break the law.” He was stunned because he thought all of these behaviors was common everywhere.
If you start having a bad feeling about something in your company, start examining that in an honest way. As you said in the beginning of this, wallet does not depend on them believing this nonsense. Go to church. I go to church. Have some sort of moral, external foundation that you can run these things through. Even if it’s not a church, if it’s a group of people you intimately trust. Share your unease.
Similarly for people who are leading today, in your experience or you’ve seen systems that are resistant to this, what habits encourage internal truth-telling and truth to power and prevent this cultural decay?
To me, you’ve got to have these independent quality assurance if you’re in a manufacturing.
True, no conflict setup.
Every now and then, bring in a consultant who gets a certain amount of money. I think there are obviously there have been disasters, but I think the big four accounting firms do a pretty good job in most instances looking at internal accounting and making sure that it abides by international accounting laws and audit process.
I think you need to have an occasional auditor come in who’s again independent. You’re going to pay them upfront, you’re never going to pay them again, there’s no incentive for them to sweet-talk you. Just do a basic audit of our practices and see whether they not only are ethical but align with the law. There are ways to do this. Almost no companies really follow any of that.
I’m a huge Costco fan. I don’t have it today, but other times, I will be wearing Kirkland’s signature clothing. I think that that’s a company that pays its employees. The average pay is much higher at Costco than it is elsewhere. They have all kinds of other controls. When I covered the FDA, which the first word in FDA is food. Costco, it turns out, has a food safety program that is second to none. They simply do not allow unsafe food practices amongst their suppliers. It is the best in the world, no one else is close.
Those guys don’t have any incentive that says you get paid less based on EBITDA or else you don’t recall the chicken, that’s the problem.
Exactly. There are organizations that do this right. Costco is one. I actually tell the story in EPO of Johnson & Johnson which hid more than a dozen studies showing that EPO killed people and Roche which was getting into the EPO business, their study showed EPO killed people. They printed that study. They made it public. It was because Roche got into the EPO business that we eventually found out that EPO was deadly. Again, just like I was saying about Eli Lilly, Roche given the same circumstances as Johnson & Johnson decided to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing. There are companies out there doing it right and there are companies out there like Johnson & Johnson that again and again choose to do it wrong.
I assume incentives are inextricably intertwined here.
The thing about Johnson & Johnson that really is deadly is that it’s this company of a million subsidiaries. The company is constantly opening and closing subsidiaries. If you don’t kill your numbers, you’re going to lose your job. You have then reapply within Johnson & Johnson, so it sets up this extraordinary incentive structure to for bad behavior.
Mediocre results and down is going to lead you to lose your job anyway, so why not take some serious risks for the better results? It’s the only way you’re going to survive. For me, another classic is lesson from a corporate perspective is don’t play this subsidiary game where everyone in your organization is constantly at fear of losing their job if they even bring in mediocre results.
You need to say something’s not working. This is the story of the Volkswagen scandal. The engineers couldn’t match the efficiency and they were afraid to tell their boss, so they put all of it into this ingenious cheat mechanism rather than saying, “Look, we can have the mileage or we can have the exhaust. It just doesn’t work otherwise.”
It obviously will happen in organizations even without this subsidiary model, but Johnson & Johnson’s family of companies increases the unease and anxiety of all of their employees, increases their risk of losing these highly paid, well-compensated jobs and thus incentivizes them to take some extreme risks, even breaking the law.
In the metal-on-metal hip implant case, they changed the design of the metal-on-metal hip implant on a Friday and then they applied to the FDA with the old design on the following Monday. Executives at the company signed sworn statements that this application was true even though they were on the email chains on Friday showing that they were going to change this design. Of course, one of these executives got on the witness stand and cried like, “I am not a liar. That’s not me,” but the record is so clear.
Can’t you pierce the corporate veil with that? Was there anyone personally liable?
I have all the grand jury files. I point out that the prosecutors considered going after executives individually and decided not to. This is the difference between Purdue Pharma and J&J. Purdue Pharma, even during the height of the opioid crisis, about 10% of the bodies that showed up in morgues had a Purdue Pharma product in their system, 60% had a J&J product in their system. Why don’t that, Robert? Why don’t that it was J&J really behind the opioid crisis, not Purdue Pharma?
The prosecutors in that case and others considered going after Johnson & Johnson. They did go after Purdue Pharma, but remember, Purdue Pharma was this tiny company. If they go after J&J, their prospects for employment after government plunge. Three of the four prosecutors on the Risperdal case ended up going to law firms where J&J is one of their biggest clients.
Why didn’t they go after individuals in that case? Do you really want to do that and ruin your future employment prospects? That’s why Johnson & Johnson is so different from everyone else. They are so powerful that at every stage of accountability, including journalism, by the way, of course, Johnson & Johnson is one of the biggest advertisers in media, they got away with it.
Johnson & Johnson one of the biggest advertisers in media, and this allowed them to get away with their illegal activities.
Get In Touch With Geraldine
We could talk about this all day but I know we both need to get going. I know they can buy the book anywhere, No More Tears. Where can they learn about you or where you’re writing these days or where can they find you?
I am working on another project. I’m going to keep it quiet it’s investigative stuff. The worry here was that I was going to get sued and stopped and I have that worry on this next project as well so I’m going to keep it to myself. I’m around. You can find me on LinkedIn, Gardiner Harris. Reach out. You can get the book almost anywhere. As you know, Robert, it’s a hard read. It’s a dark story. I lived with this dark tale for five years in writing it.
Ultimately, what I hope comes out of it is that all these people I talk about, they got all these citizenship awards. Alex Gorsky, even though he’s arguably one of the principal causes of the opioid crisis, got the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the Drug-Free Kids of America Society. It’s just like you can’t make this up.
What I hope is that people will read this. There are a lot of names in this in this book. Maybe these people are around the corner from you and maybe you tell them one day, “That was quite a problematic book and I’m sorry you found yourself in it.” these people need some accountability and this company needs accountability. By the way, this is continuing. The baby powder lawsuits are not done, the Tylenol autism lawsuits are not done, and this company has a lot of explaining to do.
All right, Gardiner. Thank you for joining us. You’ve uncovered a vital story about accountability or maybe the lack of culture and so much more. I think there’s a lot of takeaway for people, no matter what aspect of business they are in or organization or culture. Thank you for joining us.
Sure. Thanks for having me, Robert.
You can learn more about Gardiner and his work on the episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed this episode of the show in general, I have a very small favor to ask. Just take a minute to share this conversation with someone you think would appreciate it. If this episode with Gardiner made you see or think about things differently, hit the share button and text or email it to a friend. It really helps spread the word and the message. Thank you again for your support and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
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