Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Three doctors and a man diagnosed with mesothelioma testified on Tuesday in the second Congressional hearing over the safety of cosmetic talcum powder products, but it was the person who did not show up who got the most attention.

Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Illinois, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform's Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, opened the hearing by stating he was "disappointed" that Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky refused to appear.

"While Mr. Gorsky has not refrained from making multiple public statements on this topic, including authoring written statements and speaking with media outlets, he has now avoided voluntarily testifying under oath before Congress," he said.

Subcommittee member Ayanna Pressley, D-Massachusetts, had a more pointed statement: "Mr. Gorsky, I hope you're watching today, because we still want answers."

Republican members of the subcommittee said their Democratic colleagues rejected Johnson & Johnson's proposal to have an alternative executive testify and questioned the overall fairness of the hearing, given that the witnesses were experts for plaintiffs in talcum powder trials across the country.

As a result, the hearing "may result in the perception that the committee's investigation is not about learning new facts about the potential harm of consumer products but rather is about trying to publicly shame or embarrass a company and seek out 'gotcha' moments to aid in ongoing litigation—something this committee has been regularly doing in the past year," said subcommittee member James Comer, R-Kentucky. "I worry, too, that the committee's actions raise questions about whether it's using its investigative tools to interfere with, or give the appearance of interfering with, ongoing litigation."

Johnson & Johnson issued a lengthy statement that referenced a Dec. 2 letter by its lawyer, Brian Smith, a partner at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., offering its own expert or another executive to testify.

"Unfortunately, the one-sided format of today's hearing was indistinguishable from what has already been propagated by plaintiff lawyers in the ongoing litigation," the statement said. "We had hoped to contribute to a balanced and meaningful discussion about such a highly specialized topic, yet after ongoing conversations with the subcommittee, it rejected hearing from our technical expert who holds multiple degrees in geology and has decades of experience testing for asbestos. It also refused to hear from our company group chairwoman responsible for the North American Consumer Health business. We repeatedly informed the Subcommittee that our CEO is not an expert in the hearing topic, and we respectfully declined the invitation for our CEO to testify."

The hearing is the second before Congress over cosmetic talcum powder's safety. In March, the same subcommittee held the first hearing after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned consumers that four cosmetic products from retailers Claire's and Justice contained asbestos, a known carcinogen linked to mesothelioma. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also had issued subpoenas in an investigation of asbestos in Johnson & Johnson's baby powder.

At the time, Johnson & Johnson criticized the hearing as "biased with a majority of witnesses being connected to litigation against our company."

The focus of the first hearing, which featured a plaintiffs expert and the son of a woman whose widow won a $72 million verdict in 2016, was cosmetic talc's connection to ovarian cancer.

On Tuesday, the subcommittee asked about another cancer, mesothelioma, after the FDA, on Oct. 18, found a type of asbestos in a sample of one lot of Johnson & Johnson's baby powder. Johnson & Johnson recalled that lot—about 33,000 bottles of its baby powder—the same day and later brought in two separate laboratories to conduct multiple tests of the same bottles the FDA used. Those tests found no asbestos, although one lab initially discovered asbestos in one of its findings, which Johnson & Johnson attributed to contamination from a portable air conditioner.

Additional testing found no asbestos, prompting Johnson & Johnson to conclude earlier this month that the "most probable root causes for the FDA's reported results were either test sample contamination and/or analyst error" at the lab.

The discrepancies raised questions about various testing methods—the focus of Tuesday's hearing, titled "Examining Carcinogens in Talc and the Best Methods for Asbestos Detection." The witnesses were William Longo, founder of Materials Analytical Services; Jacqueline Moline, a physician at the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research at Northwell Health; and Dr. Rod Metcalf, an associate professor of geology at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Johnson & Johnson challenged the scientific findings of both Longo and Moline in a 2018 talcum powder trial in which a man diagnosed with mesothelioma got a $117 million verdict.

Longo and Moline both told the subcommittee on Tuesday that their research found asbestos in talcum powder.

"Independent labs throughout the country and over the course of several decades have documented the presence of asbestos in consumer talc products, including Johnson & Johnson's baby powder," Longo said. "The methods used in the past and today by the industry are not sensitive enough to detect trace levels of asbestos."

Subcommittee member Carol Miller, R-West Virginia, questioned Longo's research, noting that in the early 2000s he testified that asbestos in talc was an "urban legend."

Longo said that was before getting access to thousands of internal documents at Johnson & Johnson and using a "much more sensitive method" of testing.

Glenn Grothman, R-Wisconsin, another subcommittee member, asked Longo how much he made being an expert at trials, insisting reports of as much as $30 million. Longo replied that he made between $1 million and $1.5 million in the past three years.

The fourth witness was David Etheridge, one of four plaintiffs who won a $37.3 million verdict in New Jersey on Sept. 11 against Johnson & Johnson.

A Presbyterian minister from Virginia, Etheridge was diagnosed with mesothelioma at age 56.

"Baby powder containing talc was the source of my asbestos exposure and the cause of the cancer that will kill me," he said. "At the very least, we should regulate the use of talc or add warning labels to the products, but, ideally, we need to get this stuff off the shelves."

Krishnamoorthi, who sent a letter to Gorsky asking for more documents by Dec. 24 on the testing of Johnson & Johnson's baby powder, vowed there would be yet another congressional hearing on the safety of cosmetic talc and said he hoped Johnson & Johnson would participate in the future.

"Too many people are demanding too many answers to important questions, and the safety of Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder cosmetic products is now in serious doubt," he said.