The Johnson & Johnson cancer drug scandal that encapsulates corruption in health care The EPO disaster in many ways exceeds that of prescription opioids

https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/erythropoietin-epo-scandal-cancer-drug-johnson-and-johnson-no-more-tears-excerpt/?utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8lWIBauKpgnAPLDP5IEtwdx-YX2z13QwEsDiL3BTjtFmMzIqwCPUtO3z4EH_L2Ij2KVsmOJayTFjbiIM42ac-sBxwu6A&_hsmi=354890839&utm_content=354890839&utm_source=hs_email The pharma scandal you forgot Erythropoietin — also known as EPO — is mostly remembered as one of the drugs that cyclist Lance Armstrong used to win seven Tours de France wins. But what you may have forgotten, or never known, is the role this blood thickener played in a disaster that by one estimate cost nearly half a million people their lives. It started in 2003, when a study concluded that EPO could be killing cancer patients. Johnson & Johnson sold it as a cancer treatment under the brand name of Procrit, and experts initially assumed the study was an outlier. But it wasn’t the first study to come up with these alarming results — months earlier, a study found that almost three times as many participants died when taking Procrit as did in the placebo group. So what happened? “Lies, feckless government oversight, and the participation of nearly every oncologist and cancer hospital in the country are all part of this story,” writes Gardiner Harris in a new First Opinion essay.