Drug and Device Law: Fosamax Plaintiffs Between A Rock And A Hard Place

It's been hard time lately for Fosamax plaintiffs.  Here's the unabashed defense take. - gwc
Drug and Device Law: Fosamax Plaintiffs Between A Rock And A Hard Place:

We have discussed before (here and here)how the defendant manufacturer in Fosamax litigation took advantage of a fairly unique regulatory history to meet the Supreme Court’s unprecedentedly high "clear evidence" standard from Levine and preempt an entire MDL’s worth of warnings claims from before the drug’s label changed in 2011. For us, this was noteworthy and welcome. Prescription drug cases are fundamentally about warnings and many plaintiffs base their claims on the purported need for labeling that never would have been approved in the real world. Without devolving into a Bexisish rant on why Levine was wrong and many courts have been unduly frightened away from applying preemption because of facile readings of Levine—our own version of Charybdis—we can say that a clean preemption win in a prescription drug case was long overdue.

The Fosamax plaintiffs, not surprisingly, did not share our view and persisted in trying to keep their litigation going with post-labeling change cases. Well, they kindof persisted. Mostly, it seems that they desperately wanted to avoid a consideration of the merits of their remaining claims while keeping the litigation pending. This required a series of maneuvers that ultimately ended up with the plaintiff in In re Fosamax (Alendronate Sodium) Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 12-1492, 08-08, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 82003 (D.N.J. June 17, 2014), squarely between—you guessed it—a rock and a hard place when the defendant moved for summary judgment. We suspect many other plaintiffs in the litigation will end up in the same place.'via Blog this'