For many years, the “one-two punch” was our affectionate label for post-Mensing cases that prevent innovator liability and preempt generic liability. But it’s been several years since we’ve used the expression this way because it was so effective in knocking out those cases, we just aren’t seeing them like we used to.
Almost a year ago we wrote a post called Learned Intermediary – Not Just for Failure to Warn about a California putative economic loss class action that was dismissed for failing to plead any allegations about whether the drug manufacturer had adequately warned plaintiff’s prescribing physician. Fast forward about 9 months and we posted about
Product liability litigation over Class III medical devices is an interesting creature. Absent something unusual, cases and litigations should not get past motions to dismiss. That is pretty clearly what Congress intended when an express preemption provision was added to the Medical Device Amendments of 1976. We understand that each plaintiff may think her case is exceptional in that it should meet the exception to the rule of preemption. (We do not really think the plaintiff lawyers think that, although they sure argue it enough.) But the usual is more common than the unusual by definition. When you hear hoof beats, you should look for a horse not a zebra, unless you happen to be in a part of the world where zebras are endemic or end up in a zebra enclosure in a zoo. When you hear Class III medical device product liability case, you should look for all claims to be dismissed unless there is something as unusual as a basis to claiming the plaintiff’s particular device deviated from its FDA-approved specifications.
In 2001, the Supreme Court made getting past motions to dismiss harder when it held in Buckman that plaintiffs could not recover claims predicated on violations of FDA regulations. An unfortunate fiction developed post-Buckman—particularly after Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. 552 U.S. 312 (2008)—that plaintiffs could assert “parallel claims” that were neither expressly preempted by the provisions of the MDA nor impliedly preempted under Buckman. We, and others, have described the purported path of a parallel claim as being like navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, a monster and whirlpool on opposite sides of a narrow strait per ancient Greek mythology. Without claiming that mythology is the same as fiction—we are not touching that with a twenty foot sarissa—we can say that a true parallel claim is as rare as a striped unicorn or perhaps a flying horse. The unfortunate fiction of which we spoke above has taken shape with particularly egregious appellate decisions like Bausch such that some trial courts are advised, when they hear the hoof beat of a Class III medical device product liability case, to expect Pegasus or his stripy, horned pal to gallop around the corner.
Viewed over the course of more than five years and many decisions, three of which have featured in prior posts (here, here, and here, which drew honorable mention honors in 2018), we think Bausch delayed the inevitable in Gravitt v. Mentor Worldwide, LLC, __ F.Supp.3d __, 2022 WL 17668486 (N.D. Ill. Dec. 14, 2022), by insisting that parallel claims for failure to report adverse events to FDA exist. After an unnecessary odyssey, the manufacturer of a Class III breast implant won summary judgment on the last of plaintiffs’ claims, alleged failure to report adverse events to FDA. (We say “plaintiffs,” but the decision referred to the plaintiff with the implant—who we will call the “plaintiff”—by her first name and the consortium plaintiff by his first name. In terms of whether the last claim was supported, the court referred the female plaintiff only and somehow omitted any reference to “burden.” These are usually signs that at least one claim will survive summary judgment.) A shout out to Dustin Rawlin and his colleagues for sticking it out on this case and sending us this decision.
Continue Reading Fallacious FDA Reporting Claim Finally Falls
Two weeks ago, we decried the pattern that some courts follow in allowing shifting slates of boilerplate allegations to cases to discovery. The decision in Corrigan v. Covidien LP, No. 22-cv-10220, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 210296 (D. Mass. Nov. 21, 2022), reminded us of another of our post-TwIqbal pet peeves: when courts treat sweeping legal conclusions as if they were plausible factual assertions. The basic allegations in Corrigan were that the plaintiff’s surgeon used defendant’s surgical stapler to perform an anastomosis—reattachment of two parts of the digestive tract—in connection with removing part of his sigmoid colon (for unspecified reasons, but often diverticulitis or cancer) and the anastomosis later leaked, leading to further surgical intervention. As we said two weeks ago, medical device manufacturers are not insurers. That makes sense because surgery on humans, even done by the best surgeons, in the best hospitals, and with the best devices and equipment, has less than a 100% success rate. Anastomoses leak, infections develop, hernias recur, patients report post-operative pain, and all manner of complications and less than optimal outcomes occur. A common refrain when scientists are presented with a surgical study reporting no complications or failures is that the study was too small, too short, and/or insufficiently rigorous. Thus, a common procedure with a very high success rate will still generate large numbers of reported failures, like anastomoses that leak. This is part of why rates, and particularly comparative rates, provide more useful information about devices and surgeries than do gross numbers.
Even more authoritative sources than this Blog agree with us. FDA, for instance, makes clear that data from its Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience (“MAUDE”) database “is not intended to be used either to evaluate rates of adverse events or to compare adverse event occurrence rates across devices.” The reasons for this are not a secret: “The incidence, prevalence, or cause of an event cannot be determined from this reporting system alone due to under-reporting of events, inaccuracies in reports, lack of verification that the device caused the reported event, and lack of information about frequency of device use.” Directly stated, “[t]he submission of an MDR itself is not evidence that the device caused or contributed to the adverse outcome or event.” FDA’s description of the MAUDE database also makes clear in a number of places that the data may be outdated or incomplete for various benign reasons.
Continue Reading Criticizing FDA Reporting Systems Should Not Be Enough To Plead A Warnings Claim
Drug manufacturers are not insurers against injury from or while taking medications. Neither are distributors or pharmacies. Just because a patient experiences a complication while taking a medication, including the very condition the medication is supposed to help prevent, does not mean that some person or entity should be liable to the patient for her injuries. Sometimes, there is no fault or liability to be found. We do not think these are controversial principles, but we find that they apply to more than a few of the cases giving rise to the decisions about which we expound.
We also find that missing facts from complaints can speak volumes. Similarly, when a plaintiff waits until the third complaint to add case-specific factual allegations that should have been there from the start or when factual allegations pop in and out of serial amendments you have to question the basis for those allegations. At least we do. As inveterate curmudgeons, we tend to think bare-bones, boilerplate allegations are unlikely to be supported if the case gets to the merits. Of course, part of the game for some plaintiffs is to get past pleadings and hope the defendants opt for settlement instead of paying the costs of defense. The Twombly and Iqbal decisions tightened pleading standards, and thus improved the chance of success on motions to dismiss in federal court and some states have followed along. The hole, and source of our periodic grumbling, is how often dismissals are without prejudice and accompanied by leave to amend. Too often, it seems that the provision in Fed. R. Civ. P. 15 that courts “should freely give leave when justice so requires” leads to leave even when it should be obvious that amendment will be futile, not to mention a waste of judicial resources.
Continue Reading Five Strikes Needed To Dismiss A Questionable Case
A potential top-ten case came across our desks the other day, and even better, it comes out of our home state of California. In Amiodarone Cases, No. A161023, 2022 WL 16646728 (Cal. Ct. App. Nov. 3, 2002) (to be published), the California Court of Appeal held that federal law preempts state law failure-to-warn claims alleging that branded and generic drug manufacturers did not ensure that patients received FDA-approved Medication Guides for amiodarone, a heart medicine. Along the way, the Court disabused several harmful misconceptions on California’s learned intermediary doctrine and held that fraud claims based on journal articles and decades-old statements were bunk.
The FDA approved amiodarone in 1985 as a last-resort treatment for ventricular fibrillation, and a few years later—in 1989 and 1992—the agency notified the manufacturer of statements that it considered false and misleading, including purported promotion for an unapproved use. Id. at *1. Fast forward a few decades, and hundreds of plaintiffs in a coordination proceeding in California have alleged that they experienced side effects after their doctors prescribed amiodarone off label. Id. at *2.
You read that correctly. These plaintiffs were reaching back to alleged misstatements made 30 years ago. Moreover, amiodarone has been available in generic forms since 1998, so the plaintiffs ginned up claims against generic manufacturers, too—that all defendants (branded and generic) failed adequately to warn plaintiffs of potential risks because they did not ensure that patients received FDA-approved Medication Guides with their prescriptions.
This is not a new idea. Amiodarone patients in other jurisdictions have made similar Medication Guide/warnings claims, and some have survived challenges to the pleadings, including in Wisconsin and Illinois. You can see our take on these orders here and here. Long story short, we disagreed with those results, especially the short shrift that those orders gave to implied preemption.
Regular readers of the blog know and appreciate our focus (fixation?) on the learned intermediary rule. Not because it is fun to say and makes us feel smart. No, we follow and write on the learned intermediary rule because it is a cornerstone of the law on allegedly inadequate drug and device warnings. It holds
Some of us DDL bloggers have admitted to occasionally choosing our subject case based on its length. In theory a shorter case is less complicated, has less to analyze, and takes less time to write up. In theory. In reality, if there is not enough “there” there, drafting a compelling post can require more creative
It has been 23 years since New Jersey adopted a direct-to-consumer advertising exception to the learned intermediary rule. And, as of last week it remains the only state to have done so. Every state has adopted some version of the learned intermediary rule. So, it is saying something that in almost a quarter of a
Confident prescribing physicians and implanting surgeons are the best “learned” intermediaries. They’re experienced at what they do and aren’t intimidated by plaintiffs’ counsel and their threats of malpractice claims if they don’t testify the way plaintiffs want them to. Confident learned intermediaries stand by their medical decisions. Thus a confident learned intermediary’s testimony will defeat causation as a matter of law by stating that, notwithstanding a poor result, the treatment provided was standard of care, and even in hindsight they would not do anything different. Because we encountered many stand up learned intermediary surgeons in the Bone Screw litigation, several of the relatively early decisions from the 1999-2001 timeframe are Bone Screw cases.
Continue Reading Confident Learned Intermediaries Defeat Warning Causation