Abbott Laboratories, the company that made billions selling COVID test kits, allegedly used the people assembling those kits as a source of illegal genetic intelligence, forcing workers to hand over their family’s medical secrets before they were allowed to set foot on the factory floor.

Abbott Labs Demanded Your DNA. The Law Said No. They Did It Anyway.

This is a story about power and paperwork. Abbott Laboratories is a global pharmaceutical and medical device company headquartered in Abbott Park, Illinois, with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. The person on the other side of this lawsuit is Quentin Nixon-Cobb, a contract assembler from Waukegan who applied for a job putting together COVID test kits and was handed a packet of forms on his first day.

Buried in that packet was a 5×7-inch document asking about his family’s medical history. Did any relatives have diabetes? Heart disease? Cancer? He filled it out. He believed, reasonably, that his job depended on it. Nobody told him otherwise. Abbott never said the questions were optional. Abbott never provided written or verbal instructions to skip them.

This happened twice. The same form. The same silence. The same implicit threat: answer these questions or don’t work here.

The Human Cost: What Abbott Actually Took

When a corporation demands your family’s medical history, it is demanding knowledge about your body that you may not even possess yourself. Quentin Nixon-Cobb did not walk into Abbott’s facilities as a medical subject or a research participant. He walked in as a worker who needed income, in November 2020, during a pandemic. The company had advertised for assemblers. He applied. He was hired within one or two days. And on the very first day, before he had earned a single hour of pay, Abbott handed him a form and expected him to expose the health vulnerabilities of his entire family.

The complaint alleges Abbott collected this information specifically to evaluate the risk that workers might have inherited conditions like hypertension, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or stroke, and that Abbott then used this data when making hiring decisions, staffing assignments, and determinations about workers’ compensation claims and medical leave. Read that again slowly. Abbott allegedly screened people’s genetic lineage to figure out who might cost the company money if the job made them sick. Workers who came from families with histories of heart disease or cancer may have been quietly steered away from higher-paying roles, denied certain assignments, or viewed as liabilities before they had performed a single task.

This is precisely the dystopia the Illinois legislature was trying to prevent. During the 2008 GIPA amendment debates, one member of the Illinois House explicitly described a world in which genetic data could be used to identify “a pool of people that no one would want to employ.” Abbott, according to this lawsuit, built exactly that screening system. It just hid it inside an onboarding packet, surrounded by mundane tax forms and direct deposit slips, so workers would have no reason to question it.

The betrayal here operates on a specific and intimate level. Nixon-Cobb’s relatives did not apply for a job at Abbott. His parents, siblings, grandparents, whoever carried the genetic histories he was forced to disclose, never consented to having their health information handed over to a billion-dollar corporation. Their privacy was violated by proxy. Their medical vulnerabilities became Abbott’s data. And that data was allegedly fed into a system designed to protect Abbott’s bottom line from the human cost of employing people who might get sick.

The broader context makes this worse. In 2020 and 2021, Abbott was one of the most prominent COVID testing companies in the world. Nixon-Cobb and workers like him were assembling the very products that governments and health agencies were depending on to manage the pandemic. These were not abstract warehouse jobs. These were people doing essential work during a national emergency. And Abbott allegedly used that moment of economic desperation, when millions of Americans needed any work they could get, to quietly harvest genetic intelligence from its own workforce.

The Stakes: What Each Violation Could Cost Abbott

Straight From The Complaint: Abbott’s Actions In Their Own Words

“Defendant chose to disregard Illinois’ genetic privacy laws by repeatedly asking job applicants and/or employees to provide genetic information, in the form of family medical history.” Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 8

“On information and belief, Defendant requests this family medical history information for the purpose of evaluating the risk that the individual may have inherited genetic conditions from family members, and then improperly uses that information when making its hiring decisions, staffing assignments, and determinations regarding workers’ compensation claims and medical leave.” Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 44

“On information and belief, Defendant requests this family medical history information as part of an effort to avoid risk and/or liability for workplace injuries and/or deaths caused by genetic conditions, including but not limited to hypertension, cancer, heart conditions, diabetes, and stroke, which Defendant believes could be inherited and that could be exacerbated by workplace conditions, especially if these conditions are high-stress and/or physically demanding.” Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 45

“Defendant intended to solicit the family medical histories of new employees. Defendant put the improper questions on a separate form, which Defendant routinely distributed to new employees during the onboarding process. Defendant required new employees to fill out the form and turn it in along with other onboarding documents. Defendant did not make it optional.” Class Action Complaint, Paragraph 68

“Defendant intentionally and/or recklessly captured, collected, and/or retained Plaintiff’s genetic information in the form of his family medical history in violation of Illinois law. As a result, Defendant’s violations were willful because it knew, or reasonably should have known, that it was failing to comply with the above-described requirements of GIPA.” Class Action Complaint, Paragraphs 47–48

Abbott’s Pattern: The Same Form, The Same Silence, Twice

The timeline matters. Abbott’s use of the same form across at least two separate onboarding cycles, spanning more than a year, destroys any argument that this was an accident or an oversight. Employees at two different facilities, Gurnee and North Chicago, were subjected to the same paperwork. Nixon-Cobb personally witnessed dozens of other new workers receiving what appeared to be identical packets. This was not a rogue manager acting alone. This was the system working as designed.

The lawsuit seeks class certification covering all people who applied for or were hired by Abbott in Illinois within the five years before the June 2025 filing, and who were asked to provide family medical history. The complaint states the amount in controversy exceeds $5 million (roughly enough to cover the annual mortgage payments for 80 median-income Illinois homeowners). That figure represents only the floor.

GIPA’s damages structure is per-violation. Every individual worker who was asked to fill out that form represents one violation. Every worker who was onboarded twice represents two violations. If the class numbers in the thousands, and each violation triggers the $15,000 willful-violation ceiling (about what the average American minimum-wage worker earns in an entire year of full-time labor), the total exposure becomes staggering.

What This Does To All Of Us

Public Health: The Law Exists Because The Alternative Is Catastrophic

The Illinois legislature did not pass GIPA in 1998 as a bureaucratic formality. Lawmakers were responding to a real and documented fear: that the growing availability of genetic information would give employers and insurers the power to pre-emptively exclude people from jobs and coverage based on inherited risk factors they could do nothing about. During the 2008 GIPA amendments, a member of the Illinois House described a constituent who came to her in the late 1990s as a third-generation ovarian cancer survivor, terrified that genetic testing would cost her her job or her insurance.

The member stated plainly on the House floor: if a woman carries the gene associated with breast cancer, she faces up to an 84 percent probability of developing the disease in her lifetime. The ability to know that, to take preventive action, to plan her life, depends entirely on whether she trusts that the information will stay private. Abbott’s alleged behavior directly corrodes that trust. If workers know that handing a family medical history to their employer during onboarding is standard practice at major corporations, they will hide information from their own doctors, skip genetic testing, and avoid preventive care, because the risk of corporate exposure outweighs the benefit of medical knowledge.

The complaint captures this logic directly, noting that “few women would want to learn about a predisposition to breast cancer if that meant that they could be barred from certain jobs or prevented from obtaining life insurance.” Abbott’s alleged conduct does not just harm the individuals whose data was collected. It degrades the entire ecosystem of genetic healthcare by making workers afraid of their own biology.

Economic Inequality: The People Abbott Targeted Were Already Vulnerable

Quentin Nixon-Cobb applied for a job assembling COVID test kits in November 2020. The country was in the middle of a pandemic. Unemployment was high. Gig and temp work were among the few readily available options for working-class people without specialized credentials. Abbott advertised assembly positions and hired him within one or two days of his application. This was not a job market where workers had leverage. This was survival employment.

The complaint alleges Abbott specifically used this onboarding process to screen for inherited health risks in the context of physically demanding, high-stress work environments. In practice, this means workers with family histories of conditions like hypertension, diabetes, or heart disease may have been filtered out of or away from specific assignments, not because of anything they had done or could do, but because of who their parents or grandparents were. This is a mechanism for calcifying economic disadvantage. Communities that have historically faced higher rates of these conditions, often due to systemic poverty, food insecurity, and environmental exposure, would face compounded barriers to employment at a company like Abbott.

The complaint further notes that individual workers would have essentially no viable path to sue Abbott on their own. An employee would need to find an attorney willing to take a $15,000 case (enough to cover about four months of average American rent) against a massive pharmaceutical corporation on contingency. The power imbalance is built into the economics of the legal system itself. The class action structure is the only mechanism that makes accountability even theoretically possible for workers in this position.

What Abbott Allegedly Saved. What Workers Lost.

Who To Watch. What To Do.

Corporate Roles Under Scrutiny

• Abbott Laboratories: Illinois Corporation, Abbott Park HQ. Defendant in this class action.
• Abbott’s Hiring and Training Managers: The complaint alleges corporate leadership “knew or should have known” that managers were distributing the illegal form during onboarding at Gurnee and North Chicago facilities.
• Temporary Staffing Agency [REDACTED – Not in Source]: Nixon-Cobb was hired through a temp agency. The complaint notes Abbott may bear liability for agents acting on its behalf. That agency’s role in distributing the form has not been publicly identified.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): The federal enforcer of GINA, the federal genetic information law GIPA was modeled on and expanded beyond.
• Illinois Department of Human Rights: State-level enforcement body for employment discrimination in Illinois.
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): Oversees federal genetic privacy rules including 45 C.F.R. § 160.103, directly cited in this complaint.
• Illinois Attorney General’s Office: Has authority to investigate systemic violations of Illinois employment and privacy law.

If You Worked at Abbott in Illinois

If you were hired by Abbott Laboratories at any Illinois facility within the last five years and filled out paperwork that asked about your family’s medical history, including questions about conditions like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, hypertension, or stroke affecting your relatives, you may be a class member in this lawsuit. Contact the attorneys of record: Kent M. Williams and William M. Sweetnam at Siri & Glimstad LLP, and Edward A. Wallace and Mark R. Miller at Wallace Miller. You do not need money to join. Class actions are built so that people without resources can still hold corporations accountable.

Beyond this case: connect with worker centers and labor organizing groups in Lake County and the North Shore region of Illinois. The workers most harmed by genetic data exploitation are temp and contract workers with no union protection and no HR department on their side. Mutual aid networks, worker advocacy organizations, and community legal clinics are the infrastructure that makes individual courage collective power. Find them, fund them, and show up for them.