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The Senate passed a bill spending hundreds of billions of dollars on climate and healthcare programs while raising taxes on large, profitable companies, as Democrats unified around elements of President Biden’s agenda after a year of frustrated efforts to advance a broader package, the Wall Street Journal reported. The legislation, which passed the Senate 51-50 on Sunday with a tiebreaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris, offers tax incentives for reducing carbon emissions, seeks to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of some prescription drugs, allots roughly $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service and extends subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Along with a new 15% corporate minimum tax, it creates a 1% excise tax on companies’ stock buybacks and sets aside roughly $300 billion toward reducing the deficit. The package will still need to clear the narrowly Democratic House in a vote scheduled for Friday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and progressive caucus leader Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) have backed the proposal, putting it on course for likely approval. Republicans argued that the climate and tax package would do nothing to cool inflation and would hurt the economy, and that tax increases on corporations would hit households as well.

Johnson & Johnson’s bankrupt subsidiary won court permission to set a price tag on mass litigation linking the company’s talc-based baby powder to cancer, the latest setback for injury claimants who argued the estimation would be “a road to nowhere,” WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Michael Kaplan of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Trenton, N.J., said yesterday that he has retained an outside expert to conduct an independent valuation of the roughly 38,000 cancer lawsuits pending against J&J and its talc subsidiary, LTL Management LLC, as well as any additional injury claims that could be brought against the company. The expert, lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, has mediated some of the largest product-liability cases in U.S. history, including the $20 billion settlement related to the BP PLC oil spill. Feinberg is slated to issue a report before Judge Kaplan rules on how much talc-injury claimants are owed. LTL has said estimating the valuation of the lawsuits would move its chapter 11 case forward and foster settlement talks to help resolve the litigation. Judge Kaplan agreed, saying yesterday that Feinberg’s report would aid settlement discussions and rejecting injury claimants’ argument that an estimation proceeding would stall the case. Judge Kaplan said that he wouldn’t set a deadline for Mr. Feinberg to produce his report but that he anticipates he will receive the report “before the weather starts getting cold.”

When Zosano Pharma Corp. spun out of Alza Corp. 16 years ago — and up until the company plotted the last in a series of regulatory filings to win approval of its first drug-coated microneedle patch — its leaders hoped to transform drug delivery, the San Francisco Business Times reported. Instead, the Fremont, Calif.-based company is set to be sold to a onetime partner today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for up to $1.25 million, a fraction of the money it raised earlier this year in a last-ditch effort to keep the company and its migraine pain-relief patch program afloat. Emergex USA Corp., a Doylestown, Pa.-based subsidiary of the U.K.’s Emergex Vaccines Holdings Ltd., would pay $1 million for substantially all of Zosano's assets if the sale is approved Thursday. Emergex also could pay as much as an additional $250,000 to cover the dismantling and removal of some of those assets. Emergex was chosen last week by Zosano and consultants after an auction. A $500,000 bid from LTS Lohmann Theraprie-Systeme AG of Germany — only for some Zosano assets — was set aside as a backup bid if the Emergex deal falls apart.