Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol, Pepcid And Other Products Will Be Off Store Shelves Until Next Year

Johnson & Johnson CEO William Weldon is stepping down this month. More than 20 health care products made by his company have been recalled since 2009.

It's going to take a while longer for Johnson & Johnson to get rid of the headaches provoked by a string of recalls of popular over-the-counter drugs.

The drug company is backing off predictions that it would resolve its manufacturing problems this year, the New York Times reports. Products like Infants' Tylenol, Pepcid Complete, eight-hour Tylenol, and Simply Sleep may be unavailable until 2013, Dominic Caruso, J&J's chief financial officer, said during a conference call with investors and reporters yesterday, the Times reports.

Whether consumers who've been hearing about massive recalls for three years will resume using those products is another story.

"We are behind where we thought we would be at this point," Caruso said, according to the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey. The main reason is it's taking longer than expected to fix problems at the Philadelphia-area plant where Johnson & Johnson makes most of its most popular over-the-counter drugs, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Over the past three years, Johnson & Johnson has been forced to yank packages of Tylenol, Motrin, Rolaids, Benadryl, Pepcid, Zyrtec, Mylanta, and other products off store shelves due to manufacturing problems. In many cases, consumers opening bottles of Tylenol and other drugs were confronted with musty, moldy, and otherwise foul smells, according to a Reuters timeline of J&J's troubles.

Johnson & Johnson's corporate reputation survived seven murders committed with poisoned Tylenol in 1982. Now, the company must recover from a series of self-inflicted wounds. Nearly two dozen recalls contributed to a 2.4 percent decline in sales of consumer health care products during the first quarter of this year, J&J announced this week. Amid the controversy, longtime CEO William Weldon has decided to leave this post this month, though he will remain chairman.

The Food and Drug Administration stepped in last year to oversee the rehabilitation of plants where the drugs were made. Johnson & Johnson's McNeil Consumer Healthcare division shut down the Fort Washington, Pa., plant in April 2010, the Inquirer reported. Another Pennsylvania facility and one in Puerto Rico are still in operation.

In spite of the bad news for Johnson & Johnson's consumer health care business and a slight decline in overall first-quarter sales to $16.1 billion, the company announced yesterday that profits rose 12.5 percent to $3.91 billion during the first three months of this year.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post inaccurately said Children's Tylenol currently is not available. Johnson & Johnson recalled some lots of Children's Tylenol in 2010 but the product has since returned to store shelves. Infants' Tylenol remains off the market.

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Comments

[safara]

01:09 AM on 04/19/2012

The recalls have involved well established products that require no special pharmaceutical skills or techniques. Other firms have no trouble bringing these drugs to the marketplace This has to be the result of lax and very poor supervision and quality control. This company and its subsidiaries is making huge profits while legal actions and lawsuits have suggested that this is a company with a culture with contempt for consumers. Offenses have ranged from off label claims to pricing irregularities involving healthcare providers and taxpayers. Huge fines (billions)have been leveled without noticeably affecting profits. Its sins are often covered with misleading advertising and slick promotion. J&J is not a class act and its success can only be due to consumers who remain unaware of what a seriously and even dangerously flawed corporation this is. God market is not working for the benefit of the consumer in this instance.

[OldTulsan]

06:53 PM on 04/18/2012

http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0518/chinadrugs.html
You Don't Know Where Your Drugs Come From And Neither Does The FDA; U.S. Imports 90 Percent Of Its Antibiotics (And Vitamin A) From China

"China has surpassed the United States as the world's largest manufacturer of bulk drugs, vitamins and nutritional supplements and is now exporting a large portion of its production to the United States. Tens of millions of American consumers have no idea that the majority of the over-the-counter drugs they are purchasing now originate in China, where there are "relatively few regulations related to pharmaceutical exports in comparison to industrialized economies," according to a report commissioned by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The increasing dependence on China for active pharmaceutical ingredients and nutritional supplements "presents a range of issues for concern."

In 2008, China produced $25.7 billion worth of bulk drugs (up 23 percent from 2007), and exported $17.6 billion of that output (an increase of 30 percent over 2007). "For many years, China has been exporting more than half of its bulk drug products to nearly 200 countries," according to the study by NSD Bio Group. "As a result, China-sourced raw ingredients have a growing impact on the global pharmaceutical market."

The country is now the world's largest producer of acetominophen used in Contac, Benadryl, Excedrin, Sudafed, Theraflu and Vicks, among others..."

[westronandnan]

05:23 PM on 04/18/2012

When all is said and done, it will be found that they were cutting corners. Cut, cut, cut so there's more for the big shots. Same song, second verse.

[cadawa]

03:16 PM on 04/18/2012

How long does it take to make sure your products produced in a clean environment and are safe for their customers (especially infants)?
These folks thought they could get away with not fixing the problem. Another important reason that public corporations should be heavily regulated.

[safara]

01:20 AM on 04/19/2012

The tragedy is that they thought they could get away with not fixing the problem and for too long they did get away with it. The problem is that corporations profit from capturing the very regulatory agencies responsible for oversight. For too long J&J has been effective in molding regulations to enhance their profits. I agree that strong regulation is needed along with enforcement. In this case a perp walk of responsible excutives might be and effective deterent.

[LVNJen]

02:33 PM on 04/18/2012

The Tylenol murders from 1982, as well as the 1986 incident were also "self-inflicted' wounds.

Read The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder and Johnson & Johnson by Scott Bartz to learn why the holding up of J&J's handling of the Tylenol murders as some sort of "gold standard" of crisis management is completely and utterly absurd. Bartz presents compelling evidence that those tamperings happened within J&J's distribution channels, and these recent "manufacturing problems" certainly add further evidence that pretty much anything--metal flecks, bacteria, musty odors, and yes, even cyanide can make it into J&J's products to be delivered to the consumer. There absolutely was no "madman" traveling from store to store, placing cyanide-laced pills back on store shelves.

Which means all those "tamper proof" wrappings are completely worthless.

http://www.amazon.com/THE-TYLENOL-MAFIA-Marketing-ebook/dp/B005P81BO6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1334719287&sr=8-2

[Corie Lemmon]

01:17 PM on 04/18/2012

EVEN when it does become available, I still WON'T buy it....J&J is a terrible company that doesn't care about the people who buy its products.

[safara]

01:24 AM on 04/19/2012

I agree with you completely and wish that other consumers and J&J stockholders shared your perception and outrage.

[Corie Lemmon]

01:32 AM on 04/20/2012

when I have my baby I am pregnant with, I am bringing my organic baby wash and telling the nurse's they are NOT allowed to use J&J baby wash on my baby