The Stengels’ claims, as they appear in the initial complaint, are expressly preempted under section 360k and Riegel. The claims generally challenged the safety and effectiveness of Medtronic’s pump without any hint of an allegation that Medtronic’s conduct violated FDA regulations. To be successful, the claims would have required the trier of fact, as a matter of state tort law, to conclude that the device should have either been designed differently from what the FDA required through premarket approval, or labeled with warnings different from what the FDA required. Therefore, the district court correctly dismissed the Stengels’ initial complaint.
There is no meaningful distinction between [plaintiff’s] failure-to-warn claims and the “fraud-on-the-FDA” claims held to be preempted in Buckman. . . . The only difference is that, in Buckman, the defendant allegedly misinformed the FDA overtly by providing false information, whereas here the defendant allegedly misinformed the FDA tacitly by failing to report information that it had a duty to report. The policing of such conduct in both instances is committed exclusively to the federal government, and recognizing a state cause of action based on such conduct would conflict with the statutory scheme established by Congress.
The federal regulations that Medtronic is alleged to have violated, which require investigation and disclosure to the FDA in a particular manner so that the FDA can make a decision whether notification of consumers is necessary, are not tied to this general duty to warn consumers under Arizona law. Thus, the Stengels’ failure-to-warn claims, to the extent they survive express preemption, exist solely by virtue of the FDCA disclosure requirements and are, therefore, impliedly preempted.. . .We offer no opinion as to whether a particular state claim that is tied directly to compliance with federal law would be preempted under Buckman. In this case, the duty of manufacturers under federal law to report to the FDA information regarding their devices is not tied directly to the duty of manufacturers under state law to warn consumers of a device’s dangerous condition. On the contrary, the enforcement of the duty to report is an element of the federal scheme that is committed solely to the federal government.