While Johnson & Johnson hopes to soon resolve more than 60,000 talc lawsuits with an $8 billion bankruptcy settlement in the United States, its baby power problems are only just beginning in the U.K., according to several news outlets in the country.
A British law firm representing 1,900 talc claimants has sent a letter to J&J, giving advance notice of a group-action lawsuit that it plans to file in the High Court in London, according to The Financial Times.
The claims would be the first of their kind in England against the U.S. healthcare giant, the newspaper reports, citing KP Law, the firm involved. The litigation is expected to begin next year.
“All of the claimants, predominantly women but also some men, who have sustained cancer after using Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder products have experienced a life-changing illness," KP Law's head of product liability Tom Longstaff said in a statement posted on the firm's website. "In some cases, they have died from their cancer, leaving their families devastated. All of these innocent individuals deserve justice."
In a statement to Fierce Pharma, a J&J spokesperson, referring to regulatory filing, said that its consumer health spinout Kenvue is responsible for talc litigation outside of the U.S. and Canada.
As is the case in the U.S., the U.K. claimants allege that J&J’s talc-based products contained cancer-causer asbestos and that the company continued selling them after knowing for decades that they were contaminated.
While J&J has long defended its iconic baby powder, the company removed it from the market in North America in 2020 and then the rest of the world in 2023. J&J now sells a cornstarch-based version of the product.
"(The company's) findings uniformly show the absence of asbestos contamination in Johnson’s Baby Powder and the talc sourced for Johnson’s Baby Powder. Independent science makes clear that talc is not associated with the risk of ovarian cancer nor mesothelioma," J&J litigation chief Erik Haas said in an emailed statement.
In September in the U.S., J&J appeared to be nearing resolution of more than 60,000 claims when it added $1.75 billion to a proposed settlement, bringing its pot to $8 billion. The company's proposal gained the support of 83% of the claimants.
But in October, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a motion (PDF) to dismiss Johnson & Johnson’s settlement effort, which was facilitated by the company’s bankruptcy claim. The DOJ called the strategy “a textbook example of bad faith,” and said that the subsidiary J&J established to handle the claims “has no need for bankruptcy relief.”
The DOJ contends that there is nothing different about J&J’s Chapter 11 case from its two previous bankruptcy attempts which were dismissed in New Jersey because a federal court ruled that the subsidiary, LTL Management, was not in financial distress.
"There is a group of U.S. mass tort plaintiffs’ lawyers who are actively pushing a false narrative about the history of talc and its alleged contamination to media globally. Their narrative defies logic, rewrites history, and ignores the facts; it is also not new or newsworthy and collapses under any balanced and thorough investigation," Haas said.