Drug Recall Lawyer Blog

I wish Vegas had a line on things like: Johnson & Johnson will have another recall that almost makes them caricatures of themselves. With that intro, I give you another Tylenol recall.

I'm repeating myself but Johnson & Johnson was a great company. You shouldn't lose that status virtually overnight. (I'm using dog years to define "overnight".) If I were a stock analyst, I would rate J&J a long term buy because I'm convinced in the long run, someone is going to turn this company around. Hopefully, this is the bottom. I've been saying this about the housing market for a year. But, really, there has to be a bottom, right?

I was unaware until just today of the Accutane lawsuit filed by James Marshall. You don't know who James Marshall is? Yes you do. He was the guy who gave the Code Red to Santiago (the other one, not the guy who said, "There is an officer on deck" at the end, creating a lot of pollen in my house). Apparently, Martin Sheen testified at trial, reversing a family policy to stay out of the public eye.

• Accutane lawsuit (an overview)

With all due respect to Ted Frank, the Drug and Device Law Blog is making a mad run at the all time lead for snarky comments about plaintiffs. I'm a traditionalist; I would like to see a playoff.

Here's the latest open-ended, unexplained jab at plaintiffs made in a comment about a federal judge's ruling in the Kugel hernia mesh cases:

The court rejected defendants’ motion to strike plaintiffs’ experts, who were an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a long-time professor of bioengineering and orthopedic surgery research at the University of Pennsylvania. We don’t see many plaintiffs’ experts with those kinds of credentials, and their credentials and experience appear to have persuaded the court to overlook an otherwise shaky foundation for their testimony.

Really? Where is the evidence/argument you refer to that this federal judge was overwhelmed by the experts' credentials? I'm fine with anyone taking this position - who knows, maybe they are right - but how about offering a fact or two to support your position. If you are unabashedly committed to taking the defense position on every issue, it is a little hard to jump all in based on unsupported analysis.

Continue reading " Funny Line from Drug and Device Law Blog " »

Johnson & Johnson Ethicon will recall of 360,000 surgical wound draining devices after concerns that the sterilized packaging could be compromised.

It is late on a Friday. You will have to fill in your own snarky comment about another J&J recall.

Zicam lawsuits? The ones where people get hurt? I support them. Zicam lawsuits where the investors are complaining they got the shaft? Less so.

Of course, the Supreme Court has my back on all pro-plaintiff lawsuits that I really didn't care about in the first place. The Court unanimously ruled yesterday that investors suing Zicam's manufacturer can rely upon the failure to disclose reports of adverse affects about Zicam.

I own stock both for investment and for the sport of it (it is like playing craps with the wind to your back). But I'm not a huge fan of these shareholder lawsuits.

Johnson & Johnson owned Ortho-McNeil misled doctors about the safety and effectiveness of Risperdal, according to a South Carolina jury who may give South Carolina $360 million in penalties. Last year, a Louisiana jury awarded that state $257.7 million in damages. Shouldn't every state jump on board this train? Ten states already have.

You can find the details here. Honestly, I'm thinking of a spin off Johnson & Johnson Drug Recall Lawyer Blog. It could be "The Jeffersons" to "All in the Family".

If your sole source of information about drug and medical device companies was the Drug Recall Lawyer Blog, you would have a pretty low opinion of drug and medical device companies. We all agree that drug companies are doing great things and awful things. We just disagree with the balance.

On the very positive side of the ledger sheet for drug companies is Bristol-Myers Squibb's incredibly exciting news that its new drug Yervoy prolonged survival in advanced skin cancer patients.

Because many skin cancers are extremely minor - my wife was diagnosed with incredibly minor skin cancer last year - skin cancer does not get as bad of a rap as it should. Some skin cancers - particularly, obviously, advanced skin cancers - are tough to combat.

Bristol would have gotten an even bigger on line hug from me if they had actually released the test results. Why not? But let's not cut it too thin. I take them at their word that Yervoy is testing great. And I don't mean that in the Mitch McConnell "I take President Obama at his word that he is a Christian" sense of the phrase.

The U.S. subsidiary of Bayer AG, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals is facing a "$100 million" class action lawsuit from six class representative plaintiffs alleging illegal gender discrimination.

This lawsuit against Bayer claims that Bayer discriminates in pay, promotions, and the treatment of pregnant women. Bayer allegedly - and I find this hard to believe - published and distributed articles hinting that men are better suited to be managers than women.

Plaintiffs' lawyer said:

Bayer engages in systemic discrimination against its female employees - particularly those with family responsibilities - by paying them less than their counterparts, denying them promotions into better and higher paying positions, limiting their employment opportunities to lower and less desirable job classifications, and exposing them to different treatment and a hostile work environment. To make matters worse, Bayer is often blatant about its disregard for its female employees.

I have no idea if there is any merit to this and I doubt anyone outside of the Bayer circle really knows.

Bayer was also bizarrely in the news earlier this month when a plaintiffs' lawyer in the Yaz/Yasmin lawsuits started beating up a Bayer corporate witness over Bayer's role in the Holocaust, starting the deposition by talking about the Holocaust. Why the Holocaust is relevant to the Yaz lawsuits is beyond me. Personally, I think attacking Bayer about the Holocaust deflects historical blame from the real bad guys: the people who participated in the atrocities.

Tony Soprano: Sil, break it down for 'em. What two businesses have traditionally been recession-proof since time immemorial?

Silvio Dante: Certain aspects of show business and our thing.

Let's add one more: anything fear related. For time immemorial. The FDA is telling consumers to beware of buying fake iodide drugs that are supposed to help protect against radiation.

The demand for potassium iodide a full half a world away has skyrocketed since the radition leaks in Japan. The crazy thing is people would be so much safer if they just pledged to keep two hands on the steering wheel and didn't talk on the cell phone. People are driving unsafely to the store to get potassium which is jumping over dollars to pick up pennies.

The CEO of recall-plagued Johnson & Johnson took a 7% pay cut last year. Ouch! He had to feed his family on $28.7 million? Mercifully, he got a 3% pay raise in February.

Big picture, it is hard to know how much of J&J's problems rest with its CEO just like it is hard to tell how many of our economic problems were caused by President Obama or President Bush. But the game is scored by what happens on your watch. Since J&J's CEO took the helm 9 years ago, the wheels have fallen off the cart. J&J's drugs and medical devices have gained the interest of not just plaintiffs' drug injury lawyers. There have been investigations by various government bodies, including a House committee, the FDA and even a criminal probe by the feds. Arguably, you and I could run the company for half of his salary - I might even go down to $10 million - and create a similarly situated mess.

According to a new study in Cancer published Monday, tamoxifen (Nolvadex, Istubal, and Valodex) may prevent breast cancer in women who are at risk. The study found that tamoxifen, which reportedly causes only minor sides for most patients, may prevent 29 breast cancer cases and nine breast cancer deaths for every 1,000 women.

AstraZeneca has gotten a lot of heat on this blog and elsewhere from drug injury lawyers. But this may be one where they deserve a lot of credit (even if they bought the company that developed the drug).

Topamax lawsuits may be "what's next?" in terms of significant mass tort cases. The gist of the allegations in the Topamax lawsuits are that Ortho-McNeil, which - surprise - is owned by Johnson & Johnson should have (1) never put Topamax on the market because of the risk of birth injuries in children whose moms were on Topamax, and (2) issued a recall for Topamax as the evidence accumulated that Topamax was causing cleft lip/cleft palate birth injuries. Even if you don't think there should have been a recall, it is hard to argue that the risks of these injuries were adequately laid out for potential mothers and their doctors.

We put up a page on Topamax lawsuits on our website which will provide more information about the Topamax claims.

DePuy's president resigned yesterday. What does this mean for settlement of the DePuy hip replacement lawsuits?

My question is: who replaces him? If it is someone outside of DePuy, it increases the likelihood the DePuy hip lawsuits settle faster. Why? It is always easier to accept the pain that comes with settling cases when you were not the person on the line making the decisions that caused the problems in the first place. Would a new DePuy president from outside of the company - outside DePuy, not necessarily J&J - be more inclined to pay a reasonable settlement value on the thousands of hip implant cases that are out there? Of course.

Continue reading " DePuy Hip Replacement Settlements: Good News? " »

Smartabouthealth.com says that Johnson & Johnson has "had a bad stretch over the past months with recalls", joining the Understatement of the Month Club. It would be like saying Charlie Sheen has had a few weeks with some turbulence.

J&J added one more recall to the long list yesterday, recalling faulty insulin cartridges that were leaking. This recall is over 380,000 faulty insulin cartridges manufactured by Animas, yet another subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.

Does J&J have all of these subsidiaries in part to deflect culpability for these recalls? Lawyers are not running "Johnson & Johnson hip implant lawsuit" ads. They are running "DePuy hip implant lawsuit" ads (yes, I had to add in the link... I couldn't help it). I really don't think they have these subsidiaries just to avoid bleeding their image because they know these subsidiaries are putting out high risk products. But the Oliver Stone in me wonders.