Johnson & Johnson

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J&J is home to globally known household products such as Tylenol pain medication and Aveeno body lotion. But over the past year, its health care and pharmaceutical businesses made the most news. The company began distributing its Janssen single-dose COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021. Manufacturing problems and the vaccine’s lower efficacy compared with products from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna hindered its adoption, but as of May 2022 about 19 million doses had been administered in the U.S., and millions more internationally. In July 2021, J&J agreed to pay up to $5 billion as part of a nationwide settlement agreement to fund state and local efforts to address the opioid crisis. (The company admitted no wrongdoing related to marketing of its pain medications.) And in November 2021 the company announced that it would essentially become a pharma pure play; by late 2023, J&J will spin off its consumer products businesses as a separate company.