J&J can contest evidence linking its talc to cancer, US judge rules | Hacker News Reader

J&J can contest evidence linking its talc to cancer, US judge rules

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17 pointspg_123427 comments

At some point the US court system needs to examine the timeliness of judgements as a core component of justice. It's wild that J&J can hold off the lawsuits for years while it's tries dodgy shell games to offload the legal liability. It's twice as insane for the slimey J&J guy to then come out and say "Oh well the passage of time means..". Yes, the passage of time means that all the people that J&J gave cancer will be dead long before a single penny of compensation will be paid. It's also wild that the judge has decided to re-open the examination of evidence based on a recent rule change approved by the supreme court. It's almost like their spurious corporate bullshit bought them enough time to literally change the rules around their case. Good thing the supreme court is above the suspicion of being bribed though.

Here's a simple question: If your product doesn't cause cancer, why did you stop selling it.

> If your product doesn't cause cancer, why did you stop selling it

We lost the Lyme vaccine to untrue reports about their side effects. The truth doesn’t dictate public opinion and public opinion dictates what stays on the market.

> If your product doesn't cause cancer, why did you stop selling it.

If you didn't do anything, why did I have to beat you?

This is abuser logic.

"At some point the US court system needs to examine the timeliness of judgements as a core component of justice"

It does.

The rest of what you write isn't actually what happened, though to be fair the article sort of makes a hash of it. The trial hasn't happened yet. There is no reopening of anything, this is normal resolution of pre trial motions that happens in all lawsuits.

The lawsuit is actually moving at a normal speed (fast even. It is also the case that the time taken he is as much plaintiffs needing time as defendants) and this particular ruling is totally normal and would have happened anyway.

Your last question has a simple answer that is the same as why everyone stopped using MSG despite it turning out to not be bad for you.

The rest of what the grandparent commentator wrote is both the perceived and actual outcome, regardless of why the legal system decided to wait years and years and years to execute its judgement.

It is neither. The legal system did not wait. The plaintiffs did. Because they thought they would get more through bankruptcy , similar to the opiate settlement

MSG is still in a huge amount of processed and restaurant food, and it’s available in a couple different forms at my local grocery store. Maybe not the best example?

It was used a lot less for a while when people were more scared of it.

It took a shit in the 90s though until people realized the claims were bunk

Are you too young to remember the ubiquitous "NO MSG" signs in every Asian restaurants window in the 90s?

>> Here's a simple question: If your product doesn't cause cancer, why did you stop selling it.

I think you need to understand how plaintiff's attorneys work. They don't need any hard evidence they just need enough fuzzy science to cause a little doubt on product liability. Then it's gold mine time. They find the Court districts with the most reliably anti-corporate jury pools and start filing cases all across the country. Pick a horrible disease like cancer and some lousy epidemiological studies and you can finance your house in the Hamptons. Meanwhile they've just petrified every customer of your product. No wins required but eventually you will get one.

I don't defend J&J overall, but I want to point out:

The "dodgy shell games" don't offload legal liability, and is not an uncommon practice to isolate different parts of a business. The shell company is still owned and operated by J&J.

And as for why they might stop selling it, lots of companies stop selling things when the public gets a bad opinion of it, even with no evidence that it's bad.

In this specific case their shell game failed - they literally tried to bundle up all the lawsuits into a "bad" company and bankrupt it but federal judges unanimously ruled they couldn't.

In theory we should put all this money towards welcoming scientific study. In fact I’m sure chemical analysis would be far cheaper than lawyers. Does talc really cause cancer or not ? My understanding is that it is a bit like vermiculite insulation, which on its own it’s completely fine, but most vermiculite mines are naturally “contaminated” with asbestos.

Wouldn’t it be great if we knew what about talc caused cancer and we could make it safe and have use of it without fear? Probably 3% of the money spent on litigating all this could have gotten us good testing and an industrial process to produce clean talc.

Unfortunately, I think that, this isn’t that - J&J wants to obfuscate the science and get off the financial hook :(

And what the hell is the “revised standard” that j&j lawyers feel they can now meet? That sounds like the con of the century.

I think like you, their finance and lawyers are not stupid. They did the maths or already know.

Doing actual scientific study might be more risky, proving product is not good. Producing clean stuff might be impossible or too expensive, too risky to go there if regulation doesn't require it. They may have to pay reparation to existing customers.

They are going to court - science is a very different bar. Even if the science shows it is safe, someone will testify that it isn't and sway the jury with how bad life is for the heirs of someone who died from cancer. Of course in reality science gives probabilities not absolutes and so the jury gets told this causes cancer in .0001% of cases but this person was that one even though there is no way to determine that and cancer has many different causes. What matters is what you can convince a jury who doesn't have a background in science or statistics.

> And what the hell is the “revised standard” that j&j lawyers feel they can now meet?

Sounds to me like it could be the engineering equivalent of reducing SLO thresholds and admitting defeat either due to not enough traffic or not enough capacity to deal with the problem properly [1]:

> You might also want to reconsider if the impact of a single failure on the error budget accurately reflects its impact on users. If a small number of errors causes you to lose error budget, do you really need to page an engineer to fix the issue immediately? If not, users would be equally happy with a lower SLO. With a lower SLO, an engineer is notified only of a larger sustained outage.

Without thinking of:

> Lowering the SLO does have a downside: it involves a product decision. Changing the SLO affects other aspects of the system, such as expectations around system behavior and when to enact the error budget policy. These other requirements may be more important to the product than avoiding some number of low-signal alerts.

The "product decision" is the court ruling and the "other aspects of the system" is how many people will die.

[1] https://sre.google/workbook/alerting-on-slos/

> Sounds to me like it could be the engineering equivalent of reducing SLO thresholds and admitting defeat either due to not enough traffic or not enough capacity to deal with the problem properly [1]

No, actually, the article describes it as a "change to the federal rule of evidence governing expert testimony, which emphasized courts' role in vetting experts' conclusions and methodology before allowing them to present evidence to a jury."

For cases like this where the judgement depends heavily on currently-unknown science, I think courts should be able to order scientific studies be done (and paid for the same as other court costs).

The study would then be commissioned by, and report to, the judge - rather than the prosecution or defence, who both obviously want to hire experts who will see everything from their point of view.

Federal Rule of Evidence 706 already provides for court-appointed experts which report to the court and the parties and for whom the costs are shared. But a battle of the parties' experts can allow the jury to weigh the credibility of the opposing opinions after the court has vetted them. J&J can afford the right experts, and the collective resources of plaintiffs (and the investment of their counsel) can easily match this.

Christ. They’re going to get away with it.

Get away with what?

Get away with being innocent. How evil of them! /s

Scientifically case against them didn't look that strong for me. If they were accused of causing lung cancer I could see that. You breathe in a littly bit when you apply talcum. Or some skin cancer or cancer local to the spot you apply the talcum.

But ovarian cancer specifically and only that? I'd believe it if they had evidence of presence of asbestos in those tumors or ovaries. But there was none.

I mean they still shouldn't have asbestos in talcum but proving they did damage with it is something else.

Every person aged between 20 and 120 at least in the west probably had copious quantities of baby powder applied all over them. Also this 60 year old man used talc based powders as underarm deodorant until aerosol based ones became dominant maybe 40 years ago. I'm wondering if talc is so causal for cancer why isn't it as prominent it is from say smoking?

Perhaps it is? There are many people who have been exposed and cancers with no known cause are common.

It might not be the asbesthos but the talc itself that cause ovarian cancer?

I mean, it is a stone powder. There might be batches with other contaminations than asbesthos depending on the mine too.

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