We have another case in which a plaintiff claimed that a pharmaceutical company is under a duty to supply its drug.  We blogged about the other one here.  These cases are interesting.  They tend to illustrate how, in litigation, you can claim almost anything.  In Bartlett, for instance, the plaintiff claimed that a company should stop selling its drug to avoid liability.  In these cases, it’s the opposite.  The defendant must sell its drug to avoid liability.  It’s no wonder
that in all these cases the plaintiffs have lost.

In this recent case, Schubert v. Genzyme Corp., Case No. 2:12CV587DAK (D. Ut. Sept. 4, 2013), the defendant, Genzyme, manufactured a drug called Fabrazyme, an enzyme replacement that is used by patients who have difficulty metabolizing their lipids.  Genzyme experienced a shortage of the drug after it found a virus contamination at its manufacturing facility.  So Genzyme rationed its supply to the market.  The plaintiff’s husband received only about 70% of his ordinary dose and eventually died.  Slip Op. at 2-3.  Afterward, plaintiff sued and claimed that the defendant failed to use reasonable care to ensure an adequate supply of Fabrazyme.

Unfortunate as the circumstances of this and other cases like it may be, the court reached the only conclusion it could.  Genzyme was under no affirmative duty to supply the drug.  While Utah, like many jurisdictions, will at times impose a duty and perhaps liability upon a defendant who has acted and brought about certain consequences (called malfeasance), it will not do so for a mere failure to act (nonfeasance) absent some sort of special relationship.  And plaintiff’s negligence claim, at bottom, was about a failure to act, whether she claimed that Genzyme didn’t supply the drug at all or didn’t supply enough:

[T]he court finds no distinction between the duty of a company that exits the market altogether and a company that does not supply enough product to meet full market demand.  In both instances, the harm is the shortage of the medication and it is an act of nonfeasance.  Genzyme should not be penalized for producing as much of the product as it could.

Slip Op. at 9-10.Continue Reading Schubert v. Genzyme Corp.: Drug Manufacturers Are under No Affirmative Duty to Sell Their Drugs