• New York Times, Friday, June 11, 2010 10:44 AM

Natasha Singer reports that Congressional investigators may issue subpoenas to Johnson & Johnson executives to compel their cooperation as it looks into the recall of children's Tylenol and other pediatric medicines in hearings before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"We are not getting the kind of information and cooperation from Johnson that I would like," Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), the chairman of committee, tells Singer. He says, for example, that the company told members of his staff that the recall involved six million bottles of children's medicines but informed the FDA that the figure was more than 136 million bottles.

A spokeswoman for parent company McNeil Consumer Healthcare refutes Towns' charges. "We have been very cooperative with the committee," says Bonnie Jacobs, pointing out that it has turned over about 20,000 pages of documents and made its executives available for interviews in a timely manner. As for discrepancy over the number of bottles recalled, Jacobs says there were about six million in stores and about 136 million bottles in consumers' homes.

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