Gardner Harris

So

That litigation continues.

But, of course, Johnson & Johnson was never prosecuted criminally.

Its executives were never prosecuted criminally.

The state of Oklahoma sued Johnson & Johnson to try to get some money back.

And that's where many of the documents showing Johnson & Johnson's behavior during the opioid crisis became public.

But there's been very little accountability for Johnson & Johnson's role in the opioid crisis.

So the COVID vaccine project for J&J was really this shot at redemption for the corporation.

By then, when COVID swept the world in late 2019 and early 2020, Johnson & Johnson, at that point, was really starting to come under pressure.

The FDA had just recently announced that asbestos was in baby powder.

The company's metal-on-metal hip implants had caused a complete disaster around the world.

The company's vaginal mesh product had led hundreds of thousands of women around the world to bleed from their vaginas endlessly and be unable to have vaginal sex.

The opioid crisis was running full tilt, and Johnson & Johnson's role in that was becoming public.

So the company understood that it was in trouble and saw COVID-19 as a chance at redemption.

And they had a partnership with a research team at Harvard.

that had been using a cold virus as a kind of gene therapy vector or vehicle to deliver vaccines.

And so they created this partnership to do the same thing for COVID-19.

Now, the problem with using a cold virus as a vector—and Johnson & Johnson knew this from day one—

is that it has this odd effect that it can cause both excessive bleeding and excessive clotting.

They nonetheless pushed ahead with this project, but Johnson & Johnson doesn't really have a vaccine business.