Media Hails New J&J Vaccine, Ignores Pharma Giant’s ‘Checkered Past’

03/04/21

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‘Morally compromised’

In response to the FDA’s emergency authorization of J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine, the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans and Catholic leaders in St. Louis immediately pronounced the injection “morally compromised,” citing the company’s “extensive use of abortion-derived cell lines” and urging local Catholics not to take it. These objections are in the same vein as a letter submitted to the FDA a year ago by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which expressed concern about the development of COVID-19 vaccines reliant on “ethically problematic” cell lines.

The cell line in which Janssen grows its adenovirus vector is a human embryonic cell line called PER.C6. The retinal tissue that launched the cell line was obtained following the elective abortion of a healthy, 18-week-old fetus. The AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID vaccine uses a different human embryonic cell line called HEK293T to propagate its adenovirus.

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Serial felons

When evaluating the potential safety of the J&J-plus-Merck experimental COVID vaccine, it would be prudent to take note of the corporate behemoths’ less-than-flattering track records as serial felons.

Merck, for example, paid out $4.85 billion in 2007 after pleading guilty to criminal charges over illegal marketing of its lethal drug Vioxx. The company has gone on to face numerous other allegations of fraud, deceit and negligence, including for its measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.

For its part, J&J’s recent criminal history includes:

  • A 2013 order by the U.S. Department of Justice to pay $2.2 billion in civil and criminal fines related to the antipsychotic drug Risperdal and two other drugs, following aggressive off-label marketing and other dubious practices such as fraud and kickbacks.
  • A 2019 award by a Philadelphia jury of $8 billion in punitive damages to a man alleging that J&J failed to warn that Risperdal could lead to breast growth in boys. Thousands of other lawsuits against J&J feature the same allegation.
  • A $572 million judgment against J&J by the state of Oklahoma in 2019 for the company’s role in the opioid crisis.
  • $3.9 billion set aside for 25,000 lawsuits related to J&J’s asbestos-tainted baby powder. And  a 2018 Missouri verdict, “one of the largest punitive-damages awards in U.S. legal history,” was reached after internal documents showed that the company had been aware of the baby powder contamination since the 1970s.

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