We’re now into the New Year but aren’t completely done with the old one. The name of the first month of the year, January, is conventionally attributed to Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, and doorways. (We say “conventionally” because some sources report that January is actually named after its tutelary deity, Juno.) Janus, like some of our opponents, is two-faced. Janus looks both forward and backward. Bexis last month took a couple of long looks backward at 2017’s best and worst cases. We’re still scrolling through the various Ten Best of 2017 culture lists for ideas, confirmations, and occasional outrages. An in-house lawyer we endlessly respect pointed us to The New Yorker’s list of top tv programs. It’s hard to quarrel with Emily Nussbaum’s choice of The Leftovers, a fever-dream about love and loss (and a lion sex boat) as the best drama. She was also right to praise American Vandal, the show that made us laugh out loud the most. (The Good Place came in second on that score.) Nussbaum also gave honorable mention to Halt and Catch Fire, an AMC show that really did seem to catch fire after its first, flawed season. HACF stopped acting like a Mad Men, difficult-guy retread, shifted focus to the female protagonists, and successfully steered us through the digital revolution – from PC clones to gaming to community chat boards to security to the web to PayPal to Yahoo to something even sexier than a lion sex boat: the Next Idea. In seasons 2-4, HACF managed to show us (rather than merely tell us) how “computers aren’t the thing; they are the thing that gets us to the thing.” That ‘thing’ is human connection. But you already knew that, right? There is an episode after the death of a major character that is the best depiction of grief and its clumsy toggling between the transcendent and the quotidian that we’ve seen. The dead leave a lot behind. Some of it goes to Goodwill. Some of it survives in silly stories. Some of it gets caught in our throats and some of it squeezes our tear ducts hard. If you are looking for something to binge, consider The Leftovers, American Vandal, and Halt and Catch Fire (and maybe Patriot, The Americans, and Mindhunter). You might also want to set aside an hour to take in episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return because you need to relive your college experience of attending a midnight showing of something arresting and supremely weird.
Today’s post takes us back to 2017 for a case that is neither particularly arresting nor even a little bit weird. Rather, the result seems inevitable. In Siddoway v. GlaxoSmithKline LLC (In re Avandia Mktg., Sales Practices & Prods. Liab. Litig.), 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 203885 (E.D. Pa. December 12, 2007), the plaintiff alleged that he sustained a heart attack from taking Avandia, and that the label did not warn him adequately. The facts here, both regarding the plaintiff’s use and the regulatory backdrop, lead ineluctably to the defendant’s victory on summary judgment. The plaintiff was initially prescribed Avandia from 2001 through 2002. In 2003, the plaintiff suffered two heart attacks, and ultimately underwent a successful heart transplant operation. He blamed Avandia for those heart attacks. Following the heart transplant, a different doctor prescribed Avandia to the plaintiff. The plaintiff continued to take Avandia from December 2003 through June 2007, and did not experience any other adverse cardiovascular condition.
Let’s go backward for a moment. When Avandia was initially approved by the FDA in 1999 to treat Type II diabetes, the drug’s label contained no warning of an increased risk of heart attack. But in 2007 – four years after the plaintiff’s heart transplant — the FDA issued a safety alert for Avandia, notifying consumers that “data from controlled clinical trials have shown that there is a potentially significant increase in the risk of heart attack and heart-related deaths in patients taking Avandia.” The FDA directed that a boxed cardio warning be added to the Avandia label. So there’s your lawsuit, right?
Not quite. Now let’s go forward. After the label change and after the plaintiff filed his lawsuit, the manufacturer and the FDA conducted extensive research on Avandia’s safety. In 2013, the FDA ultimately concluded that there was no increased risk of heart attack associated with Avandia use compared to alternative diabetes medications. Thus, in 2014, the FDA approved an updated Avandia label that removed the boxed warning for a potential increased risk of heart attack. Good science led to good news for patients, but not such good news for this particular patient’s lawsuit. All of the plaintiff’s nine causes of actions essentially boiled down to failure to warn theories, and the facts on the ground had removed all support for that theory. Even putting aside the question of whether the original label was inadequate because it lacked a warning that had now been repudiated by the FDA, the plaintiff’s case failed for inability to show that the alleged failure to warn was the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injuries. To the extent that specific claims bumped against the learned intermediary doctrine (Utah law governed, so the learned intermediary doctrine was alive and well), the plaintiff faced a huge problem when it came to posing the usual question to the prescriber: knowing what you know today, would you still have prescribed this medicine to the plaintiff? From his deposition testimony, it is clear that the prescriber’s “understanding of Avandia’s risk profile today is the same as it was when he prescribed Avandia to [the plaintiff]—that Avandia is not associated with an increased cardiovascular risk compared to other diabetes drugs. He also testified that, if the current package insert were in place when he was prescribing Avandia to [the plaintiff], he still would have prescribed it.” That is pretty inescapable logic. John Adams once said that “facts are stubborn things.” So is science. So are label changes.
But the plaintiff did try to escape the facts, the science, and the label changes. He pointed to the prescriber’s testimony that he “quit using” Avandia for patients after 2007. But that same prescriber’s testimony made clear that even when the 2007 data on which the plaintiff based his claims is considered along with the other Avandia risk data available today, he would still prescribe Avandia to the plaintiff, just as he had in 2001 and 2002, when there was no heart attack risk warning in the Avandia label. It is as if the plaintiff tried to preserve his case by seizing upon one favorable moment in time and excluding any other, subsequent facts that might prove inconvenient. Don’t look forward, and don’t look backward. Just look at the evidence in that nanosecond that might support a claim. But no decent doctor would do that. Nor would any sensible court. Hence, the Siddoway court held that the plaintiff had failed to establish a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the prayed-for warning would have deterred the doctor from prescribing Avandia to the plaintiff before he suffered the 2003 heart attacks. The court looked at all the evidence, forward and backward, and saw its way clearly towards complete dismissal of the case.