The beast part may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it serves the purpose of depicting what at least on the surface are two very opposite things. But if you delve more deeply, you find a lot of similarities. So many similarities that the two things shouldn’t really be opposites at all. That’s what happens in the fairy tale. The beast is really a prince. But life’s not a fairy tale. And neither is pharmaceutical litigation. And if it were, it wouldn’t be a Disney version, it would be one of those original Grimm Brothers’ stories – the dark and twisty ones. And that’s what we have today. Two cases that come to opposite conclusions but based on the same allegations about the same failure to warn about the same drug. We should be talking about a beauty and a prince. Instead we have a beauty and a beast . . . or at least maybe a frog.
Within two days of each other, two decisions were handed down in cases involving the generic prescription drug amiodarone manufactured by the same company – Hernandez v. Sandoz Inc., 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 120938 (N.D. Ill. Aug 1, 2017) and Tutwiler v. Sandoz Inc., 2017 WL 3315381 (N.D. Ala. Aug. 3, 2017). Both were second bites of the apple. In Hernandez, defendants moved for reconsideration of the court’s prior ruling rejecting preemption and allowing a failure to warn claim premised on defendants’ failure to provide medication guides per federal regulations. We blogged about that earlier decision here. In Tutwiler, the court had previously dismissed that same claim but plaintiff included it in her amended complaint. Defendants moved to dismiss again. Both courts stuck to their prior decisions.
Our prior post on Hernandez explains how we think the court got preemption wrong – notably by applying the Seventh Circuit’s awful PMA, medical device express preemption decision in Bausch v. Stryker to a pharmaceutical drug case and finding a parallel violation claim. On reconsideration, defendants argued that the court misapplied Bausch. In response, the court cited other district courts within the Seventh Circuit to also have applied Bausch to pharmaceutical cases, including another amiodarone case that we blogged about here. Hernandez, at *5-7. The old adage two wrongs don’t make a right comes to mind.
Unable to make the court see that this is really an implied preemption case – plaintiff was seeking to enforce an FDCA requirement regarding distribution of medication guides – defendants were left to argue that the claim isn’t really parallel to a state law duty to warn. There is no Illinois state law duty to warn pharmacists so they can in turn warn consumers. In fact, in prescription drug cases, the manufacturer’s duty is to warn the prescribing physician – not the consumer. Id. at *9n.4. From the court’s description of plaintiff’s allegations, plaintiff alleges both traditional failure to warn the prescriber and failure to warn the consumer by failing to provide medication guides. Id. at *9. The court then seems to conflate all those allegations into one plausible failure to warn claim. See id. (“The court remains convinced that plaintiff has sufficiently alleged each of the elements necessary to establish a failure to warn claim under Illinois law despite focusing much of his complaint on his allegations that defendant’s actions violated the FDCA.”). By alleging both failure to comply with the FDCA and failure to warn the prescriber plaintiff got to dodge both preemption and learned intermediary. But those are two separate claims and they should both fail.
And that’s how you turn the beast/frog into a prince. You apply both preemption and learned intermediary like in Tutwiler. First, in this case the court already dismissed plaintiff’s traditional failure to warn claim – the failure to warn plaintiff’s prescriber – under Mensing. These are after all generic prescription drugs and the Supreme Court has said they don’t survive conflict preemption. Which is presumably why plaintiffs in these cases are focused on the medication guide allegation. In Tutwiler, plaintiffs argued that failure to provide the medication violated the “duty of sameness” on which Mensing rests making Mensing inapplicable. Id. at *2. As we noted above, failure to warn based on failing to adhere to an FDCA requirement should also be impliedly preempted under Buckman or the prohibition of private causes of action to enforce the FDCA.
But the Tutwiler court said it didn’t need to consider preemption because the claim is barred by the learned intermediary doctrine. In Alabama, like in Illinois, in a prescription drug the case the duty to warn runs to the physician. Id.
[I]t does not follow . . . that if the manufacturer inadequately warns the physician, it owes an independent duty to warn the patient directly. This is the reason why this Court previously stated that “it appears unlikely that Plaintiff can state a failure-to-warn claim based on Defendant’s failure to provide a Medication Guide to her pharmacy that avoids the application of both the learned-intermediary doctrine and Mensing.”
Id. And there’s the beauty.
There is one thing that both Hernandez and Tutwiler agree on – plaintiffs’ off-label promotion claims are fraud claims that must be pleaded to the heightened standard required by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b). Both plaintiffs tried to argue that these were negligent marketing claims. Hernandez, at *3; Tutwiler, at *2. But both courts were unpersuaded by those labels given the context of the allegations. Hernandez, at *4 (“Plaintiff’s complaint is a sprawling and, at times, confusing collection of largely unnecessary allegations that, for the most part, seem to attempt to assert a fraudulent misrepresentation claim as it relates to off-label promotion.”; Tutwiler, at *2 (Plaintiff “claims that Defendant engaged in a ‘concerted and systemic effort to persuade physicians’ . . . that the drug was safe and efficacious for off-label uses). Plaintiff Hernandez is getting another chance to re-plead his fraud claims with specificity. Since this was Plaintiff Tutwiler’s second attempt, and her complaint still failed “to identify a single statement in any promotional material to support [Plaintiff’s] contention that Defendant unlawfully promoted amiodarone for [an off-label use],” her claim is dismissed.
They say beauty is fleeting – and so too is a beautiful case. The beast/frog on the other hand lives to see another day.