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Plaintiff in Gurule v. Boston Scientific Corp., 2023 Cal. Super. LEXIS 49321 (Cal. Super. Jul. 18, 2023), tried to pull off a little magic through misdirection, but couldn’t fool the court.  Plaintiff tried to distract the court from the complete lack of sufficient allegations to satisfy even notice pleading requirements by alleging an elaborate

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We do not often see state court opinions strongly endorsing federal preemption, or even weakly endorsing federal preemption.  That is why we took notice last week when the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Medicare Act expressly preempted state common-law and statutory claims against a health maintenance organization and a healthcare plan administrator.  Most

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Last year, the federal court decision to exclude plaintiffs’ general causation expert in the In re: Onglyza and Kombiglyze XR Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2809 (E.D. Ken.),took a spot in our top ten best of 2022 (original post on that decision here).  Without a general causation expert, it is not surprising that summary judgement

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When we last visited the Zostavax MDL last December, over a thousand plaintiffs, all claiming shingles as an injury, had been dismissed because none of them could produce results from the only medical test that could establish causation.  We ended that post with:

The only claims left allege that Zostavax caused a hodge-podge of other injuries.  But it’s safe to say the nucleus of this MDL pretty much self-destructed.

Continue Reading Zostavax − Dredging the Dregs

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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. 

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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

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We are just back from a lovely long weekend in Mexico.   We were delighted to find, on our DVR, a show we’d forgotten we set to record:  a special interviewing the cast and director of Love, Actually on the 20th anniversary of that film’s release.  This is our all-time favorite holiday film, and pretty close to our favorite film of any genre.  We love how it has crept into popular culture (the SNL parody of the flip cards scene, featuring Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton is nothing short of brilliant), and we find the film endlessly charming and restorative, no matter how many times we watch it.   Take a look at the special, if you missed it

Speaking of all-time favorites, today’s case deals with warnings causation, our all-time favorite doctrine.  (Along with our co-blogger, Mr. McConnell, we just presented a CLE on this topic.)  This is the doctrine:  to prevail on a failure-to-warn claim in a prescription drug or medical device case, a plaintiff must prove both that the products warnings were inadequate and that the inadequate warning proximately caused the plaintiff’s injuries. Subject to variations of local law, the general rule is that, to prove the warnings causation piece, a plaintiff must adduce evidence that a different or stronger warning would have altered her physician’s decision to prescribe the drug or device. 

In Brennan v. Johnson & Johnson, et al., 2022 WL 17219513 (C.D. Cal. Nov. 18, 2022), the plaintiff alleged that the warnings provided with her pelvic mesh devices were inadequate.  She asserted failure-to-warn claims sounding in negligence and strict liability, and the defendant moved to dismiss both, arguing that the plaintiff could not prove that any inadequacy of the warnings proximately caused her injuries because her prescribing physician had not testified that she would have acted differently in the face of a different warning. Continue Reading Lovely Warnings Causation (and More) Mesh Decision from the Central District of California