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Ethicon Media Monitoring 2/6/2019
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Ethicon loses bid for class closure order in pelvic mesh case
Feb 5, 2019 | Lawyerly
By Cat Fredenburgh
The judge overseeing a class action against Ethicon over allegedly faulty pelvic mesh implants has shot down the device maker’s bid for a class closure order. -
Judge Gives Green Light to Millions to Lawyers in Pelvic Mesh Litigation
Feb 6, 2019 | Mesh Medical Device News Desk
By Jane Akre
The judge overseeing more than 100-thousand pelvic mesh product liability lawsuits addressed the looming question of whether or not lawyers involved in the cases could collect upward of $550 million in fees and expenses in the mesh litigation. -
Pennsylvania Jury Slams Ethicon With $41M Verdict In Mesh Case
Feb 4, 2019 | Medtech Insight
By Elizabeth Orr
Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon has been ordered to pay $41m to a plaintiff who says she was injured by the company’s pelvic mesh products. -
Coca-Cola Sweet-Talks the CDC
Feb 5, 2019 | Fair Warning
By Chelsea Conaboy
...Seven manufacturers of pelvic mesh have agreed to pay nearly $8 billion to settle claims that the implants harmed more than 100,000 women, many of whom have suffered bleeding and pain.
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Ethicon loses bid for class closure order in pelvic mesh case
Feb 5, 2019 | Lawyerly
By Cat Fredenburgh
The judge overseeing a class action against Ethicon over allegedly faulty pelvic mesh implants has shot down the device maker’s bid for a class closure order.
Justice Michael Lee rejected Ethicon’s application following an interlocutory hearing on Monday, according to Shine Lawyers, which is representing the class. Justice Lee’s reasons have not yet been published.
Ethicon argued closing the class would provide certainty in upcoming settlement talks. At an earlier case management hearing, barrister for the class, Dr. Duncan Graham, SC, said closing the class would block individuals who only developed adverse symptoms after July 4, 2017 – the current cut off date for group eligibility – from joining the class.
“It is a serious step in these proceedings to seek to close the class and restrict the availability of possible settlement negotiations and the benefit of any settlement to some members and not to the whole,” he said.
The class already includes more than 1,000 Australian women who allege one or more pelvic mesh implants surgically inserted since 2005 for stress incontinence or pelvic organ prolapse caused catastrophic injuries to their internal organs and ruined their sex lives.
Justice Lee had previously floated the idea of a so-called soft class closure, which would temporarily block new group members from joining while the negotiations proceed.
The class was amendable to the idea, but Ethicon continued to push for a hard class closure order.
The class already includes more than 1,000 Australian women who allege one or more pelvic mesh implants surgically inserted since 2005 for stress incontinence or pelvic organ prolapse caused catastrophic injuries to their internal organs and ruined their sex lives.
Ethicon previously managed to restrict the class size after a post-trial bid by Shine Lawyers to amend the group member definition, winning a Full Court appeal of Justice Anna Katzmann’s approval of the group member changes in August.
Justice Lee has been enlisted to assist in the matter while Justice Katzmann, who oversaw the case’s 89-day hearing that concluded in February, writes her judgement.
Clayton Utz represents Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson.
The case is Kathryn Gill & Ors v Ethicon Sarl & Ors.
https://www.lawyerly.com.au/ethicon-loses-bid-for-class-closure-order/
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Judge Gives Green Light to Millions to Lawyers in Pelvic Mesh Litigation
Feb 6, 2019 | Mesh Medical Device News Desk
By Jane Akre
The judge overseeing more than 100-thousand pelvic mesh product liability lawsuits addressed the looming question of whether or not lawyers involved in the cases could collect upward of $550 million in fees and expenses in the mesh litigation.
On Wednesday, January 30th, Judge Joseph Goodwin of the Southern District of West Virginia, granted a request that 5% of settlements and judgments handled by this federal court could be used to compensate lawyers.
“However, based on the numerous factors discussed above and the awards given in similar MDLs, this court believes that the award given is conservative and serves to justly compensate common benefit counsel for their work without unnecessarily burdening the plaintiffs in this litigation,” Judge Goodwin wrote.
By comparison, he pointed to other courts where the fee exceeded 5%. In the Actos litigation the common benefit fee was 9.9% and in Vioxx litigation it was 6.5%.
COMMON BENEFIT FEES
Judges approved a common benefit fund in this type of mass tort to spread the cost of litigation among those who file in an MDL or multidistrict litigation. At one time, Judge Goodwin had more than 104,000 product liability cases filed against seven manufacturers.
The common benefit fee is supposed to cover all of the collective works done by law firms such as depositions and discovery, vetting experts, developing theories of liability and conducting bellwether trials so each firm does not have to reinvent the wheel.
Five percent currently represents $366 million that has been paid into the common benefit fund by defendants from settlements and jury verdicts. When all cases are settled the fees for lawyers could top $550 million.
The Common Benefit Fees and Cost Committee (FCC), made up of eight law firms, is headed by Henry Garrard of Blasingame, Burch Garrard & Ashley of Athens, Georgia, which seeks the largest amount of compensation, based on the greatest number of hours contributed to the discovery process.
Those eight have awarded themselves $249 million of or two-thirds of the $374 to be distributed. This averages nearly $29 million per FCC firm, or $739 an hour.
OBJECTIONS NOTED
With an average court settlement of about $40,000, lawyers for Kline Specter, a Philadelphia law firm that’s tried a number of high profile mesh cases, objected to the “excessive and unreasonable” fee and instead encouraged that half be returned to the injured women.
The 5% common benefit fee is too high, Kline Specter’s Lee Balefsky and some firms are being “significantly overcompensated.”
He points out that “a few firms are seeking to grab two-thirds of the fund. Instead they should remit their proportionate share of these saved funds to the injured women. Thus, the proposed allocation is directly relevant to the proposed assessment – and both are wrong.”
Meanwhile Kline & Specter falls at the other end of the range and is scheduled to collect at an hourly rate of $116, says the motion. The Philadelphia-based law firm has submitted thousands of hours of work done for state litigation in Pennsylvania, which it says are not being considered.
In a response filed December 3, Garrard claimed Kline Specter’s letter was “self-serving and unfounded” and that the Philadelphia firm benefited from research put into the MDL.
Of the seven pelvic mesh product liability trials so far in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, clients of Kline Specter have been awarded compensation in five of the seven trials totaling $105.16 million.
Since the MDL formed in 2012, tens of thousands of transvaginal mesh cases have been resolved in this court through either trial or settlement for a total sum of $7.25 billion.
There are thousands of cases still on the docket waiting to be settled or remanded back to state court for trial.
It’s estimated that settlements could reach upward of $11 billion once all of the cases make their way through the system.
Judge Goodwin agreed that every plaintiff benefited from consolidating cases and allowing each firm to take advantage or the millions of defendant-produced documents, hundreds of motions and legal theories and experts that led to bellwether trials that eventually led to plaintiff settlements.
“The fruits of this efficient process were made available to every plaintiff and their counsel. The court finds that every plaintiff benefited greatly from these efforts.”
https://www.meshmedicaldevicenewsdesk.com/judge-gives-green-light-to-millions-to-lawyers-in-pelvic-mesh-litigation/
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Pennsylvania Jury Slams Ethicon With $41M Verdict In Mesh Case
Feb 4, 2019 | Medtech Insight
By Elizabeth Orr
Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon has been ordered to pay $41m to a plaintiff who says she was injured by the company’s pelvic mesh products.
Access to full text unavailable – subscription required.
Story can be found here: https://medtech.pharmaintelligence.informa.com/MT124596/Pennsylvania-Jury-Slams-Ethicon-With-$41M-Verdict-In-Mesh-Case
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Feb 5, 2019 | Fair Warning
By Chelsea Conaboy
Sugar, sugar: Hundreds of pages of emails between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Coca-Cola Co,, obtained by a group of public health researchers, reveal once again how the world’s leading maker of sugar-sweetened beverages seeks to bend policymaking in its favor. The researchers collected emails from a period of about six years, ending in 2017. In a paper published by the population health journal The Milbank Quarterly, the researchers outlined instances when Coca-Cola executives worked to build connections with leaders within the CDC, use industry-funded research to shape their thinking and ask for the agency’s help in persuading the World Health Organization to take a more favorable stance on working with the food industry. It might not seem like much, except that the evidence is mounting, as Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post notes, for the outsize role that sugar plays in weight gain. Companies like Coca-Cola have been working hard to shift the conversation about how to curb obesity from diet to exercise.
Also: As money from Big Ag pays for more scholarships and programming at public universities, some worry that industry influence is shaping research, too. Kate Cox and H. Claire Brown of The New Food Economy look at the issue and whether corporate interests are stifling research on such issues as sustainable agriculture, the health effects of industrial hog farming and antibiotic use in animal agriculture.
On ‘the pain and addiction spectrum’: It may have seemed that the behavior of opioid manufacturers in fueling the nation’s overdose crisis couldn’t appear any worse. Now, ProPublica and Stat report that the maker of OxyContin and members of the Sackler family, which controls Purdue Pharma, considered expanding their business into the recovery industry. That would mean that the company could operate across “the pain and addiction spectrum” — a spectrum, of course, that the company helped create in aggressively marketing its highly addictive pills, according to a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general. As the role of the Sackler family in the opioid crisis becomes clearer, art and educational institutions that have benefited from donations are under pressure to separate themselves from the Sackler name and the money that comes with it, CNN reports. Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2017 New Yorker article exposed how the Sacklers’ global legacy of philanthropy was paid for largely by people using OxyContin, many of them on the path to addiction. Now, he’s writing a book about the family.
Also: Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. faces scrutiny for advising Purdue on how to “turbocharge” opioid sales, counter the emotional stories of people who had lost loved ones to overdose and sway reluctant prescribers, according to the Massachusetts lawsuit.
In big mass tort case, plaintiffs see little benefit: Seven manufacturers of pelvic mesh have agreed to pay nearly $8 billion to settle claims that the implants harmed more than 100,000 women, many of whom have suffered bleeding and pain. That sure sounds like a lot of money, but Matthew Goldstein of The New York Times reports that many women are receiving low settlements and wondering what happened to the money that they had planned to use for corrective surgery or to support themselves after injuries prevented them from working. Some are now considering filing a lawsuit against their own attorneys. Goldstein’s reporting raises questions about whether lawyers took too much in fees, or whether some insufficiently argued their clients’ case in securing a settlement amount. “Never in the field of mass tort litigation has there been such a yawning gap between success in the courtroom and failure at the settlement table,” attorney Shanin Specter told Goldstein. His firm, Kline & Specter, has won more than $140 million in jury verdicts for pelvic mesh cases, including $41 million awarded in the case of a Pennsylvania woman last week. Documents reviewed by The Times found that the average settlement in the mass tort case is less than $60,000.
Trouble in the air: Six states and New York City are suing the Trump administration in an attempt to force the Environmental Protection Agency to require power plants and other industries to curb smog-producing emissions that blow across state lines. The Obama Administration in 2015 found that about half of all states weren’t doing enough to control sources of air pollution that affected their downwind neighbors, and it toughened parts of the Clean Air Act. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed course. Attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have filed suit, joined by New York City, calling the EPA’s decision “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious,” Alexander C. Kaufman of HuffPost reports.
Also: It seems likely that, if confirmed as EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler will keep a schedule much like the one he kept in the first two months of serving in the interim role: lots of time for oil, agriculture and other industry executives, little time for environmental groups, Reuters and CNN report.
A ‘prohibitionist’ response on e-cigarettes: A group of conservative lobbying groups accused the Trump administration of “regulatory panic and significant government overreach” in responding to an epidemic of e-cigarette use among teens. A letter sent to the White House by a coalition that includes ALEC Action and the Goldwater Institute said FDA Administrator Scott Gottlieb and his agency have waged “aggressive regulatory assault” against the industry, with “prohibitionist impulses,” Laurie McGinley of The Washington Post reports. Such heavy regulation would harm adults looking for a safer form of nicotine, the letter said. It was sent just days after the New England Journal of Medicine published a large study that found smoking cessation rates among people who switched to e-cigarettes were about twice as high as among those who used nicotine replacement products such as patches or gum. But the e-cigarette users were also far more likely to continue vaping a year after they had stopped smoking. And evidence of the dangers e-cigarettes pose for teens continues to mount. In a study published last week, researchers found that young people who try e-cigarettes are more likely to take up smoking later, and that’s especially true for those who would otherwise be at a low risk for smoking. McGinley notes that other recent research has raised questions about the effects of e-cigarette flavorings on lung function.
A megaphone for gun control: The House Judiciary Committee is expected to hold a hearing Wednesday on gun violence prevention, a topic that body hasn’t taken up in the eight years since the Democrats last controlled the House, Avery Anapol of The Hill reports. Rep. Mike Thompson, a Democrat from California and chairman of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said in a press release that the committee is “answering the call of the American people.” Marking gun control as a top priority, House Democrats last month introduced a bill that would require background checks for nearly all gun sales.
Also: The advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety has published a report compiling data that illustrates this point: Nearly 3 in 5 Americans adults say they or someone they care for has been affected by gun violence.
Health risk in a juicebox?: Consumer Reports tested 45 popular fruit juices and found elevated levels of toxic heavy metals in about half of them. Twenty-one of the juices contained elevated amounts of at least one of the following: cadmium, inorganic arsenic and lead. Seven juices, including some marketed for children, had levels high enough that the group concluded they could pose health risks to children who drink 4 ounces or more daily. Those juices included products from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, R.W. Knudsen, Welch’s and Walmart. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents limit how much juice their children consume, mostly because it is high in sugar. The report categorizes the juices by those with potential health risks and those deemed better alternatives.
Scaling back on worker safety: An Obama-era rule that would have forced large employers to file detailed reports on worker injuries for posting in a public database has been rolled back by the Trump administration. Eli Wolfe of FairWarning reports that the rule was meant to make it easier to spot employers with a pattern of problems and to push them to make safety improvements on their own, but it was opposed by business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Now, instead of detailed reports, businesses with at least 250 workers will be required to file annual summaries.
Also: Tuff Automation of Michigan has paid a penalty of $28,474 after investigators found that a 17-year-old worker lost his right index finger while using a band saw without a proper guard. The company also violated child labor laws prohibiting workers under age 18 from operating hazardous equipment, according to a Department of Labor press release. –– The owner of The Gun Range in Killeen, Texas, faces proposed penalties of $214,387 after a complaint from a worker led investigators to find airborne lead levels that exceeded permissible standards and lead contamination on surfaces throughout the facility.
https://www.fairwarning.org/2019/02/coca-cola-cdc-emails-sugar-public-health/
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