The 6 Worst Health Scandals of the Past 25 Years

In medicine, there’s almost no such thing as a free lunch. Just about every drug or intervention will have its side effects.

Ideally, rigorous studies and the regulatory process will ensure that an approved drug’s benefits clearly outweigh any potential harms. But sometimes, researchers (and patients) will uncover side effects that went unnoticed during the approval process. Other times, more rarely, a drug’s maker is revealed to have buried incriminating information about their drug’s harms from the public or to have created a product that doesn’t work at all as intended. And when that happens, a bad or ineffective treatment can spark a major scandal.

There’s no shortage of pharmaceutical scandals that have occurred over the years, but to keep things short, let’s just focus on some of the biggest ones to have happened in this quarter-century.

1. Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder products

For decades, people had unsuccessfully tried to sue J&J over its consumer products containing talc, particularly baby powder, claiming that the products had contributed to their cancers.

In 2018, however, an explosive report from Reuters found the company had hidden evidence that the talc it used could sometimes contain detectable levels of asbestos, a known carcinogen. The report helped fuel a new wave of lawsuits and growing public distrust in the company’s baby powder products. In the years since, the company has repeatedly lost civil suits over its talc products, some totaling into the billions, and its appeals continued to fail, even before the Supreme Court.

Though J&J has maintained that its products are safe, the company eventually removed talc from all its powder brands (instead using cornstarch), tried and failed to cover its liability over these lawsuits by having a subsidiary declare bankruptcy, and even this year has continued to lose court cases tying its products to people’s cancer.

Interestingly enough, though asbestos is known to cause cancer, past research hasn’t found a clear link between talc as a whole (including asbestos-free talc) and cancer, and there remains some disagreement over the extent of the risk posed by talcum powder products. The American Cancer Society states that if talc can raise a person’s risk of ovarian cancer (the primary type of cancer linked to talc), the “overall increase is likely to very be small†for an individual woman. The World Health Organization has stated that asbestos-containing talc should be considered carcinogenic, while talc in general is “probably carcinogenic.â€

2. Biogen and the Alzheimer’s drug that wasn’t

In June 2021, the FDA approved Biogen and Eisai’s antibody-based Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm. At first glance, the approval should have been good news: the first drug of its kind, and one intended to actually target a key driver of the degenerative disorder, beta amyloid. But in actuality, it was anything but.

In a rare move at the time, the FDA went against the recommendations of its expert advisory panel, who voted against approval. The outside experts rightly noted that the data supporting the drug’s effectiveness was mixed at best. The FDA also granted Aduhelm accelerated approval, a special category that requires less rigorous evidence. Media outlet STAT News later uncovered an unusually friendly relationship between top Biogen employees and FDA officials, which prompted a Congressional investigation into the matter. And to add insult to injury, Biogen initially set Aduhelm’s list price at $56,000 a year—a cost high enough to potentially devastate the pockets of patients and Medicare if the drug saw widespread use among older Americans.

Many doctors soon rebelled against the approval, refusing to prescribe it to their patients, while Medicare decided to severely restrict its coverage of the drug. Biogen eventually gave up trying to make Aduhelm a thing, following years of poor sales, and pulled the drug from the market in early 2024.

This saga does have a bit of a happy ending, at least. There have been other similar drugs developed and approved in recent years, and unlike Aduhelm, these drugs do seem to have a real, if still modest, effect on treating the condition.

3. Purdue Pharma and OxyContin

Purdue Pharma has perhaps become the most infamous poster child for the opioid crisis.

Its blockbuster drug, OxyContin, helped fuel growing rates of opioid use disorder following its release to the public in 1996. And though there are many drivers of the crisis, including the proliferation of more potent agents like fentanyl in later years, the company did eventually admit to downplaying the addictive risk of its products, paying doctors illegal kickbacks to prescribe their drugs, and turning a blind eye to the widespread diversion of its drugs from pharmacies to the black market.

Following a glut of civil and federal lawsuits over OxyContin, Purdue Pharma shuttered its doors, and its sole owners—the Sackler family—agreed to pay out more than $4 billion as part of a far-reaching settlement in 2021. The courts bumped this up to $6 billion in 2023. That settlement, however, also provided immunity from further civil charges against the Sacklers themselves. And though the situation has finally started to improve as of late, roughly 50,000 Americans still died from opioid overdoses last year.

4. Martin Shkreli’s drug price surge

Sometimes the scandals aren’t about the drugs themselves, but what they’re being sold for.

In 2015, Martin Shkreli became public enemy number one when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought the anti-parasitic and anti-HIV drug Daraprim and raised its $13.50 price tag per pill by over 5,000 percent. Shkreli’s cocky, unrepentant attitude toward his many critics earned him the nickname of the “Pharma bro.â€

Ironically enough, his initial downfall had nothing to do with Daraprim. Soon after he became infamous, federal prosecutors in New York charged Shkreli with securities fraud, and in 2017, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years of federal prison.

Though Shkreli was released early in 2022, his company’s management of Daraprim did later come back to bite him. In 2020, the FTC and others sued the company, now called Vyera Pharmaceuticals after Shkreli’s imprisonment, alleging that it carried out an “elaborate anticompetitive scheme†to maintain its monopoly on the drug. The company reached a settlement with the FTC a year later, and the legal battle eventually required Shkreli himself to pay out a $64 million fine and to stay away from the pharmaceutical industry entirely. In 2023, Vyera declared bankruptcy and sold the rights to Daraprim. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court snubbed Shkreli’s attempt to dismiss his personal fine and ban.

Don’t feel too bad for Shkreli, though. Since his release from prison, he’s been busy trying to shill crypto and AI knockoffs of WebMD.

5. Abbott’s tainted baby formula

In early 2022, the FDA warned families to stay away from certain powdered baby formulas produced by the company Abbott Nutrition. The products, it turns out, were contaminated by Cronobacter bacteria.

Several children were hospitalized, and two infants who had consumed the products later died. Abbott issued a widespread recall of its products and shut down its formula production facility in Sturgis, Michigan. The FDA’s investigation concluded that Abbott had failed to maintain sanitary conditions and that the facility had at least eight recent instances of Cronobacter contamination dating back to 2019.

It would take four months for the company’s Sturgis plant to reopen, following an agreement with the FDA to overhaul its safety practices, the length of which helped contribute to a nationwide formula shortage that year. Lawmakers on both sides also criticized the FDA for its delayed response to the crisis, since the agency first caught wind of potential issues as early as September 2021.

Though there haven’t been similar recalls or reported outbreaks since, an extensive ProPublica report in April 2025 interviewed workers who claimed that the Sturgis plant continues to have serious safety and sanitary risks to this day. One employee reported what they found to the FDA, but it’s unclear whether the new Trump administration will take action.

6. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes founded the company Theranos in 2003. It centered around the development of a device intended to make blood tests easier than ever. With just a few drops of blood from a single finger prick, Holmes claimed, her company’s “Edison†device could accurately detect a litany of health conditions. By the mid-2010s, Holmes’ marketing of Theranos had allowed her to become a darling of the biotech world: a young, self-made entrepreneur styled after Steve Jobs, who at one point was worth nearly $5 billion.

The trouble was, as the world eventually found out, it was all based on falsehoods. Starting in late 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou exposed the fraudulent practices of Holmes and Theranos. Though Holmes had struck a partnership with retail chain Walgreens in 2013 to provide the Edison device to its customers, the Edison could simply never do what Holmes claimed it could. And eventually, the company secretly resorted to using other commercially available machines to perform most of its blood testing services.

Holmes’ deception didn’t just mislead investors; several people reported that the faulty test results provided by Theranos made them fearful about having medical conditions they didn’t actually have, such as HIV, or otherwise harmed their health.

Holmes was convicted of investor fraud and other charges over Theranos in 2022 and was sentenced to an 11-year stint in prison (later reduced by two years), while her co-executive and one-time romantic partner Ramesh “Sunny†Balwani was sentenced to nearly 13 years the next month. As of this year, she’s made her return to social media (via having someone else post her words).