Robert Andrews would perpetually keep in mind when his telephone rang on Friday, September 30, 1982. He was assistant director for PR at Johnson & Johnson, whose ache reliever, Tylenol, was the perfect recognized over-the-counter drug in America. On the opposite finish of the telephone was a reporter from Chicago, on the lookout for a remark.

“He instructed us that the health worker there had simply given a press convention—folks have been dying from poisoned Tylenol,” Andrews recalled in a 1990 interview. “It was the primary data we had right here on this division. We instructed him we knew nothing about it.”

Manufacturers stay in terror of moments like these—a sudden debacle that places their identify within the information, their popularity in query, and their future doubtful. Which is why, for Kenvue (the J&J spinoff that assumed custody of Tylenol in 2023), Monday’s White Home press convention should have felt just like the worst sort of déjà vu.

Announcing that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) would advise ladies to keep away from acetaminophen throughout being pregnant based mostly on a long-rumored however by no means substantiated threat of autism, President Trump singled the model out.

“Taking Tylenol is just not good,” he mentioned. “Don’t take it, don’t take it.”

The PR plight that Tylenol finds itself on this week is arguably its third—a bitter capsule, contemplating the model did nothing to trigger any of them. What’s extra, Kenvue’s speedy drawback isn’t simply yesterday’s finger-pointing, however the man pointing the finger.

“Kenvue is in a really troublesome place when a sitting president makes use of the White Home podium to discourage use of its flagship product,” mentioned David Johnson, CEO of  Strategic Imaginative and prescient PR Group, which makes a speciality of disaster communications. “The best counter is to not go toe-to-toe politically, however to lean arduous on science, security, and belief.”

Fortuitously, this can be a model with reserves of all three.

Poison capsule

The poisoned Tylenol episode of 1982—the one which prompted Andrews’ telephone to ring—exploded on the nationwide scene when seven folks died after taking Further Power Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide. (Authorities by no means recognized the perpetrator.)

To at the present time, enterprise faculties train J&J’s response as a textbook instance of efficient disaster administration. 

CEO James Burke instantly arrange an emergency technique group, which stood up a toll-free data quantity, labored carefully with the FBI, and ultimately recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol. Inside six weeks, Burke’s crew additionally rolled out tamper-proof packaging (as we speak customary for consumer-health manufacturers) and distributed coupons to 40 million folks encouraging them that Tylenol was protected to make use of.

Extra bother would come knocking on Tylenol’s door in 2010, when the FDA—alarmed by continual charges of unintended overdoses of acetaminophen—required makers of the ache reliever so as to add a liver-damage warning to its packaging.