Drug Recall Lawyer Blog

The Accident Injury Lawyer writes about the Sudafed recall from Johnson & Johnson. You can read here more about Johnson & Johnson's scores of trouble in recent years.

Vaccine lawsuits took another major blow today. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act preempts all tort design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers.

A lot of vaccine lawsuits face significant Daubert problems. This one apparently did not. It involved Tri-Immunol that came from a lot that generated 65 reports of adverse reactions, including 39 emergency room visits and two fatalities. That does not sound like a Daubert problem to me.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor dissenting opinion complained that the majority is substituting its own policy over the "considered judgement of Congress," and that Justice Scalia's majority opinion disturbs the "careful balance Congress struck between compensating vaccine-injured children and stabilizing the childhood vaccine market."

You can read the Court's opinion in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth here.

This is a really good article in the Tulane Law Review that explains the history and theory behind bellwether trials in the MDL.

The Wall Street Journal did what I have been meaning to do: make a list of recent Johnson & Johnson recalls.

President Obama does not really hate drug companies. The title of this blog post probably made you look. Sorry. I just fell into the same trap as this Motley Fool article entitled "Obama Hates Your Drug Company."

Actually, the article could also be titled "President Obama Loves Your Generic Drug Company." His new budget proposal includes new law that would allow generics to get on the market sooner rather than later, by reducing the 12-year exclusivity period that biologic drugs have now down to seven years. (I'm oversimplifying the President's plan a little bit here but that is the gist of it.)

It is unlikely to pass Congress, according to this article. Maybe strangely coming from a plaintiffs' lawyer, I have some concern about not giving drug and medical device companies enough time to enjoy the exclusive fruits of their discoveries. I don't know what the optimal period is to balance the competing interests between lower cost drugs and innovation but I just fear there is temptation to tinker with it in the short term to reduce costs (read: Medicare costs) at the expense of innovation.

Qualitest Pharmaceuticals has recalled about 11,000 bottles of its hydrocodone with acetaminophen tablets. The drug is used to relieve pain, combining hydrocodone (an opiate narcotic) with acetaminophen (a non-narcotic pain reliever).

The recall came from a mix up that led to the discovery of a bottle mislabeled as Phenobarbital. The fear is that patients may unintentionally take hydrocodone and acetaminophen when they are supposed to be taking Phenobarbital.

So will lawsuits follow? Sure if two things happen. First, someone has to actually make the mistake of taking this drug instead of Phenobarbital. Second, there has to be some injury from this error. I put the chances of these things happening together on par with the likelihood of Brett Favre hosting The View. But I applaud Qualitest for recalling the product anyway.

You can read more on this recall here.

The Baltimore Sun is reporting that the Maryland General Assembly is considering legislation to bar gifts from drug and medical device companies to doctors as another backlash from the St. Joe's stent debacle in which a doctor is accused of performing unnecessary stent procedures.

How does this tie in to gifts for doctors? Good question. I'm not entirely sure. Maryland doctors are commonly paid by drug and medical device companies to promote products to other doctors. So the thinking is maybe Abbott's incentives helped push stents?

If they enact this law, they will be making a good law for all the wrong reasons. Which I guess is okay. But, let's be realistic. It is never going to happen. Doctor and hospital lobbyists plus drug company lobbyists plus no real public inertia for change equals no change. You can bank on that equation.