J&J consumer boss retires as Tylenol probe widens

Johnson & Johnson announced the retirement of its longtime head of consumer products on Thursday, hours after a U.S. congressional panel disclosed new potentially damaging information about J&J’s recent recalls of Tylenol and other consumer medicines.

The diversified healthcare company said Colleen Goggins, 56, who has headed its McNeil consumer healthcare group for more than a decade, would retire effective March 1 and it would name her successor at a later date.

Hours earlier, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, citing “extremely troubling” information, said it would hold another hearing September 30 on the company’s repeated recalls of Tylenol and several other popular brands.

The panel, aware of one unpublicized recall of the painkiller Motrin, said it now had reason to believe J&J may have considered a second “phantom” recall—this time for Children’s Tylenol—almost a year before its April 30, 2010 formal recall of millions of bottles of that painkiller.

The panel on Thursday sent letters to J&J Chief Executive Bill Weldon and Goggins, inviting them to the hearing, and noting its concerns about phantom recalls.

“Was Johnson & Johnson considering conducting a phantom recall of children’s medicine?” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Edolphus Towns, asked Weldon in his letter.

“This is about the safety of trusted medication that our children and grandchildren use,” Towns said in a press release. “The evidence we have uncovered since our first hearing is extremely troubling.”

He cited a U.S. Food and Drug Administration document during the earlier hearing on May 27 that indicated J&J’s McNeil unit may have engineered a phantom recall of potentially flawed lots of Motrin in 2009.

Towns said the document showed that “rather than issue a public recall, McNeil allegedly sent contractors out to stores to buy the product back and told the stores ‘not to mention’ a recall.”

The committee said it subsequently had received a June 30, 2009 e-mail in which a J&J subcontractor said it was exploring a recall of Children’s Tylenol that “would make our Motrin project look small.”

The panel said the timing of the e-mail suggested J&J may have been aware of problems with Children’s Tylenol and other children’s medicines months before J&J officially on April 30, 2010 issued a major recall. It involved more than 135 million bottles, comprised of 40 formulations of children’s medicine, including Tylenol, Motrin and allergy treatment Benadryl.

During the May hearing, lawmakers blasted J&J manufacturing lapses that led to the string of recalls over the past year and said civil or criminal charges were possible.

Towns, in his letter to Goggins on Thursday, questioned the accuracy of her testimony in May.

“You testified that you were not aware of the behavior of the contractors who conducted the (Motrin) phantom recall,” Towns wrote. “However, after that hearing the Committee obtained a Johnson & Johnson/McNeil document that instructed the contractors how to behave while conducting the phantom recall.”

The company declined to comment on Towns’ letters to Goggins and Weldon.

Goggins, who became president of J&J’s consumer companies in 1995 and was promoted to company group chairman in 1998, has been a member of J&J’s executive committee since 2001.

She appeared at the May hearing, where she said J&J had not lived up to its reputation, but was taking drastic steps to clean up its manufacturing process and shake up management.

Weldon did not attend the hearing, saying he was recovering from back surgery. But the company said on Thursday he will attend the upcoming hearing.

In June, J&J spokeswoman Bonnie Jacobs disputed allegations that McNeil had executed a secret recall of Motrin, saying the company sought to remove the painkiller “from a unique channel—mainly convenience stores and gas stations—with as little disruption and consumer confusion as possible.”

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By Ransdell Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters)