Eli Lilly and Co. has settled a long-running wrongful death lawsuit filed by the parents of a South Dakota boy who committed suicide on Christmas Eve 2004, four weeks after taking the antidepressant Cymbalta.
The settlement comes a month before a jury trial was set to begin in a South Dakota federal court.
Terms weren’t disclosed in court filings. An order filed last week by a magistrate judge said the settlement involved setting up a trust fund bearing the name of the 16-year-old boy, Peter Schilf. The order also refers to “payment by Lilly of the agreed confidential amount.”
Lilly’s marketing partner for Cymbalta, Quintiles Transnational of Durham, N.C., is a co-defendant in the case. The case will be dismissed “once the (settlement) funds have been distributed,” the order said.
Cymbalta, Lilly’s top-selling drug, was approved for use in the United States in 2004 for depression and, later, for other conditions. It had sales of $5 billion last year.
The lawsuit charged that Lilly and Quintiles failed to adequately warn patients that the drug could cause suicidal inclinations in some users. The lawsuit also said that Lilly didn’t tell doctors about the February 2004 case of a 19-year-old student who committed suicide by hanging while taking part in a Lilly-sponsored patient trial of Cymbalta for urinary incontinence.
Schilf was prescribed the drug in November 2004 and killed himself by a self-inflicted gunshot a month later, the lawsuit said. A Food and Drug Administration-recommended black-box warning about suicidality wasn’t added to Cymbalta’s label until 2005, the lawsuit said.
The case was originally filed in state court in South Dakota and moved to federal court in early 2007.
An attorney for the Schilfs, Houston trial lawyer Andy Vickery, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Vickery has represented more than a dozen clients in the past who sued Lilly over failure to divulge suicidal inclinations linked to its former best-selling antidepressant Prozac. Many of those cases also were confidentially settled.
An attorney for the Schilfs, Houston trial lawyer Andy Vickery, and a Lilly spokeswoman acknowledged the settlement had occurred but would not comment on it.
Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317)444-6483.
http://www.indystar.com/article/20130409/BUSINESS/304090105/Eli-Lilly-Co-settles-wrongful-death-lawsuit?
4 comments:
PHARMA generally settles because they know if they go to trial, there is an excellent chance they'll lose, and then there will actually be a judgment against them.
By settling, there is no judgment, and since the terms of the settlement are always secret, nobody can prove why they settled or for how much.
It is simply a matter of deniability. They have millions of dollars to spend on litigation,and they gladly would spend it if they thought they could win and discourage others from filing suit. But they settle instead to keep their records as clean as possible.
The Eli Lilly Zyprexa saga,a criminal conspiracy from the get-go
Eli Lilly has made $70 billion on Zyprexa (Olanzapine) and it was way oversold and caused diabetes and in some cases sudden death.
Still making $1.5 billion year on the Zyprexa franchise.
Eight Lilly employees who are supposed ‘whistleblowers’ got $10 million each payouts, the real victims like me were ignored. Law firms on both sides of the aisle made tens of millions.
I am a living example of Zyprexa gone/done wrong was given it 1996-2000 off-label for PTSD got sudden high blood sugar A1C 14.7 in January 2000.The stuff was worthless for my condition PTSD and cost me thousands in co-pays gave me diabetes.
–
Daniel Haszard http://www.zyprexa-victims.com
They struggle to find the truth behind and get results that are in favor of the victim's side is a long process. The right choice of wrongful death attorney is a must.
One of medics' duty is to warn their patients about side effects of the drugs that they are prescribing. If only they warned the family, they should have monitored the victim's intake of the prescribed drug. A wrongful death settlement should have not happened if only they did their job properly.
Doctors must warn people about the effects of prescribed medications to avoid abuse and worst, wrongful death.
Post a Comment