Gardner Harris

And when you watch the evening news, as you know now, nearly half of the advertisements that run on the CBS evening news, NBC, all of them are prescription drugs.

Johnson & Johnson is a huge source of revenue.

for all of these major media organizations.

And so when reporters tried doing these stories, Johnson & Johnson would call the corporate headquarters and say, if you run this story, we are pulling all of our ads.

And in case after case after case, the stories got pulled.

That is an incredibly important reason why

Johnson & Johnson has managed to maintain this pristine image because corporate media simply didn't want to take it on.

So one sort of larger message that I would love to get across is that in many ways, my book is a guidebook for navigating the healthcare system for you and your family.

And what I hope is that the many stories I tell in the book will help people understand

the weak points in the system and make clear to them that some of the people in the system that they think are trustworthy are simply not as trustworthy as they think they are.

And that is certainly true of the FDA.

As I mentioned, the FDA now is largely funded by industry.

And so FDA professionals to this day will say in speeches that their customers

are the industry, not the American public, but the industry.

And so in 2012, the industry decided that they weren't going to continue to pay these fees to the FDA.

It led the FDA into a panic because if the industry didn't agree to another five-year

fee authorization legislation, the FDA was going to have to fire hundreds and hundreds of reviewers.

So the FDA commissioner at the time, Margaret Hamburg, called Alex Gorski, who was then head of Johnson & Johnson's device division,

and was about to be appointed its CEO and begged him to save the agency.

He then rallied.