MONTPELIER — Attorney General Charity Clark announced Tuesday that Johnson & Johnson will pay Vermont more than $3 million to settle allegations the company long misled customers over the safety of its baby powder and body powder products that contained the mineral talc.
It’s part of a nationwide settlement totaling $700 million.
Clark said talc is often tainted with asbestos, a mineral that can cause lung disease and cancer when inhaled. A four-year investigation by Clark’s office and 42 other attorneys general across the country argued that the pharmaceutical giant hid these health risks from customers for decades, she said at a press conference.
That amounts to a violation of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act, Clark said, noting that the company’s marketing of talcum powder products primarily targeted women.
“Johnson & Johnson not only marketed its products as safe when it knew they were not — it tried to avoid accountability by creating new entities and filing for bankruptcy,” the attorney general said.
Vermont will receive $3.1 million from the settlement over the next four years, according to Clark’s office. The money will be deposited into the state’s general fund.
Clark’s office said that when Vermont and other states launched their investigation, Johnson & Johnson stopped selling its talcum powder products in the U.S., and it more recently ended global sales of those products.
Tuesday’s settlement bars the company from manufacturing such products in the future, which Clark said went by brand names including “Johnson’s Baby Powder” and “Johnson & Johnson’s Shower to Shower.”
Clark said it’s unlikely that Vermonters still have those talc-based products in their homes today but encouraged people to check.
Notably, the company did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
The agreement comes as Johnson & Johnson faces tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging that its talc-based products caused mesothelioma or ovarian cancer. The company proposed a nearly $6.5 billion settlement to resolve many of those cases last month, after twice trying and failing to resolve the lawsuits in bankruptcy court in recent years.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson’s worldwide vice president of litigation, said the company “continues to pursue several paths to achieve a comprehensive and final resolution of the talc litigation,” including the settlement announced Tuesday.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont to get $3 million from nationwide settlement with Johnson & Johnson over products that may have contained asbestos.