Innovation. Equity. Sustainability. Responsibility. Caring.
These values underscore everything that Johnson & Johnson does, from innovating new medicines to accelerating work to promote health equity and ensuring its products meet the highest safety and quality standards.
They are also values that helped Johnson & Johnson make Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies for 2021, placing in the top 20 this year. It’s the 19th year in a row the company has been honored on the Top 50 All-Stars list, and it also placed #1 in the Pharmaceutical category worldwide for the eighth consecutive year.
The international list is compiled by Fortune in partnership with consulting firm Korn Ferry, and around 15,000 industry analysts as well as top executives and directors from major companies, are surveyed to identify companies with the strongest reputations based on a mix of nine attributes, such as innovativeness, social responsibility and the quality of their products.
Attributes such as these have been a hallmark of Johnson & Johnson’s work since its founding in 1886, and they are outlined in Our Credo, the company’s guiding mission statement. From work on an investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate to a commitment to help advance health equity, here’s a by-the-numbers look at some examples of this work—and these attributes in action—over the past year.
1.
9 months to phase 3 clinical trials for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate
Back in January 2020, when the world was just starting to learn about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, Johnson & Johnson started investigating potential vaccine candidates.
This quick mobilization—coupled with the joint expertise of scientists at the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson and researchers from the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School—enabled the company to get Phase 1/2a human vaccine trials going by July.
By September, nine months after the virus was first identified, Johnson & Johnson initiated its Phase 3 ENSEMBLE clinical trial, enrolling about 45,000 participants of all ages, ethnicities and medical backgrounds.
Last week, the company announced positive topline results from this Phase 3 clinical trial for its single-dose investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
2.
$100 million to help promote health equity solutions for people of color in the United States
Johnson & Johnson has long been committed to fighting health disparities around the world, and the company intensified those efforts in light of COVID-19, which has disproportionately impacted Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans in the U.S.
To help address this and other urgent health disparities, the company announced last November a $100 million commitment to advance health equity solutions over the next five years, such as providing healthcare to people living in underserved communities and developing partnerships designed to help combat health disparities.
3.
$50 million donation to support frontline health workers
The pandemic has taken an exceptional toll on the nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals who have worked tirelessly to help care for patients with COVID-19. In response, Johnson & Johnson announced a $50 million commitment in June to help support these crucial frontline healthcare workers in various ways.
For instance, $1.9 million was earmarked for the American Nurses Foundation Coronavirus Response Fund, which provides financial assistance and mental health support to nurses. Other funds were allocated to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, the CDC Foundation, the Pandemic Action Network and two companies that created contact tracing apps.
4.
105,000 donated courses of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis medicine
Some 1.4 million people around the world died from tuberculosis (TB) in 2019. That’s a staggering figure considering that TB is a preventable and treatable disease.
To help address such statistics. Johnson & Johnson has expanded access to its medication for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB)—a form of the disease that doesn’t respond to the two most powerful front-line TB medications currently available—by providing people in 83 countries with a total of 105,000 donated courses of medication.
And in response to COVID-19, Johnson & Johnson launched the DR-TB Lifeline QuickFire Challenge, which is providing support to five organizations working to ensure continuity of care for drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) patients in India, the Philippines, South Africa and the Ukraine.
JLABS sites around the world have served as incubators of innovation designed to support promising biotechs. Scientists at JLABS @ Washington DC will be focused on a variety of projects, including ideas for how to stop future pandemics before they start.
5.
Caring for people also means caring for the environment, since humans can’t be healthy without access to clean air, water and other natural resources.
In line with its Credo responsibility to “maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources,” the company announced in September 2020 a commitment to make all of its consumer products with 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic packaging and certified/post-consumer recycled paper and pulp-based packaging by 2025.
One aspect of this work is already having an impact: By replacing the pump caps—which contain a non-recyclable metal component—on many of its lotion and shampoo products with flip caps, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health has kept about 24 million pumps out of landfills.
6.
At the beginning of the pandemic, many healthcare workers found themselves seeking resources for how to best care for patients who were ill with such an unknown and novel virus.
To help bridge the gap, Johnson & Johnson partnered with a company called Advances in Surgery (AIS) to provide doctors, nurses and other healthcare practitioners with access to free virtual training, including online mechanical ventilation instruction.
When the pandemic started, 500,000 healthcare workers were utilizing the platform, called AIS resources—within months, that number had risen to 5 million.
7.
32,000 square feet of cutting-edge lab space
That’s what you’ll find at JLABS @ Washington, DC, which is set to open later this year on the historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center campus through a partnership with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Since 2012, JLABS sites around the world have served as incubators of innovation designed to provide promising biotechs with the resources they need to create game-changing health and wellness solutions.
Scientists at JLABS @ Washington DC will be focused on a variety of projects, including ideas for how to stop future pandemics before they start.
8.
2,600 women participating in an investigational HIV vaccine trial
In Southern Africa, more than half of all women between the ages of 18 and 25 have been infected with HIV.
That’s why, when Johnson & Johnson launched the Imbokodo vaccine trial in 2017, the focus was on enrolling women. In 2020, the project reached a major milestone: full enrollment in the Phase 2b proof of concept efficacy study, with all 2,600 participants inoculated with the investigational vaccine. Initial results are expected later this year.
