Category — Wyeth v. Levine

Aug. 30, 2011 -  Virginia Products Liability blog contributors Melissa Tannery and Nick Klaiber published an article entitled, “Defending (and Defending With) Pharmacovigilance After Wyeth v. Levine” in The Defense Research Institute (“DRI”)’s August 2011 issue of For the Defense magazine.  In the article, Melissa and Nick offer advice on how to combat attacks on pharmaceutical company clients’ pharmacovigilance programs, including arguments to exclude evidence of lapses in postmarketing surveillance, exclude plaintiffs’ expert on pharmacovigilance and exclude adverse drug event reports (“AERs”) as unreliable evidence of causation.  They also suggest ways to use the strong points of a company’s pharmacovigilance program to show that the company quickly discovers and acts on safety information and makes safety a top priority.  Lawyers defending claims of negligent pharmacovigilance should present evidence and offer testimony from a knowledgeable and well spoken company witness who will explain how the company carefully and efficiently handles, investigates and responds to the AERs it receives.  The article is a useful resource for lawyers defending pharmaceutical products liability claims in Virginia and elsewhere.

June 24, 2011 -    I love a good British comedy, and few are better than Monty Python And The Holy Grail.  One of my favorite scenes is “Bring Out Your Dead,” in which John Cleese’s character attempts to put a nearly deceased, elderly man on the “death cart”, while the elderly man cries out “I’m not dead yet….I’m getting better.”  Unfortunately for the old man, as he breaks into cries of “I feel happy…I feel happy,” the scene ends with the mortician, played by Eric Idle, clubbing him over the head to expedite his passing.

Why is this morbid scene on my mind this morning?  Naturally it is because of yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Pliva v. Mensing, 131 S. Ct. 2567 (2011), which proves that preemption of prescription drug failure to warn claims based on “impossibility” is indeed not dead yet, even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Wyeth v. Levine, 555 U.S. 555, 129 S. Ct. 1187 (2009). [Read more →]