Gardner Harris

So basically, the United States and the rest of the Western world starts edging asbestos out of our lives in the 1960s and the 1970s.

The problem is that as you move through the 1970s and as the rest of the world basically gets very good at getting rid of asbestos, Johnson's baby powder becomes this outlier.

And once you get into the 1980s, Johnson & Johnson then knows that they actually have not solved the problem.

They have hundreds of subsequent tests that show asbestos

still is in Johnson's baby powder, but they keep those tests secret.

And she says, actually, my father worked in that lab.

He knew that there was asbestos.

He also knew that you took all of his documents and all of his lab notes and sent them off to, you know, I like to think of it as the warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie.

And you've been lying about this forever.

These documents then for the first time become public.

And a reporter for Reuters does this extraordinary story showing that Johnson & Johnson has known for more than a century, essentially, that Johnson's baby powder has been contaminated with asbestos.

FDA, which had been asleep at the switch for all this time, suddenly wakes up and says, wait, what?

And FDA does its own test in 2019 of Johnson's Baby Powder, not surprisingly, finds asbestos.

And they then give Johnson & Johnson four days to come clean while, of course, people are still using Johnson's Baby Powder.

The best epidemiology suggests that something like 15% of women with ovarian cancer in the United States got it from talc-based powders.

And the biggest seller of those talc-based powders

was Johnson & Johnson's baby powder.

And so there's probably on the order of around 100,000 women died from ovarian cancer alone because of Johnson's baby powder.

I think they did that analysis over the last 50 years.

So it's likely twice that over the course of the history of Johnson's baby powder.