This right here is Johnson and Johnson,

headquartered in the state of New Jersey.

It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the whole world.

It's also one of the handful of companies that made a financial windfall during the years of the pandemic with their vaccine.

In fact, the Janssen shot was making the company upwards of $740 million per quarter just in vaccine sales alone.

That was, of course, before the shot was pulled off the market

due to an elevated risk of serious blood clots being formed in vaccine recipients.

However, having their vaccine pulled off the market

might actually be the least of Johnson and Johnson's financial worries,

given the fact that just yesterday,

the company announced a willingness to pay a $6.5 billion settlement to nearly all of the pending lawsuits in America

claiming that their baby powder, as well as their talc powder products,

cause people to develop ovarian cancer.

Once enacted, this financial settlement will actually wind up being the fourth largest in

U.S. history, right behind the 7.2 billion dollars that Enron had to pay for defrauding their shareholders.

However, aside from the sheer magnitude of the dollar amount itself, the story of how the

6.5 billion dollar settlement came to be, as well as the legal maneuvering that Johnson and Johnson

has been doing behind the scenes to try and shield themselves from all these different lawsuits,

well that is a fascinating story to say the least.

And so let's go through it together. To start with, unbeknownst to most people, to this day, there

have been tens of thousands of plaintiffs who have alleged that Johnson and Johnson's

baby powder, as well as their other talc-based products they contain

...