Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Pfizer - Prempro: now that's punitive!

Pfizer must pay about $75 million in punitive damages to an Illinois woman who developed cancer after taking one of the drugmaker’s menopause treatments, people familiar with a sealed verdict in the case said.

A Philadelphia jury ordered Pfizer’s Wyeth unit Oct. 26 to pay the bad-conduct award, which is about 20 times larger than the $3.7 million in actual damages the panel awarded to Connie Barton over her use of Wyeth’s Prempro menopause drug, according to people with direct knowledge of the verdict.

A judge ordered Barton’s punitive-damage award sealed at Wyeth’s request until the trial of another Prempro lawsuit in the same courthouse is completed. Lawyers in that case say jurors won’t start deliberating on that suit’s claims for another three weeks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A 112 million dollar punitive award indicates outrage by the "wanton and reckless” conduct by Wyeth. This is the tip of the iceberg, as another ten thousand cases are waiting for their day in court.

Women's Health Initiative Bombshell

Seven years ago, a bombshell appeared in the medical literature, and massive numbers of women switched from Prempro to safer bio-identical hormones. This was the 2002 WHI study which showed that PremPro causes breast cancer. This massive shift away from synthetic Prempro reduced breast cancer rates to 10,000 fewer cases per year. (NEJM Volume 356:1670-1674 April 19, 2007 Number 16)

Click For More.

Jeffrey Dach MD