After Federal District Judge Michael Shipp took over for Chief District Judge Freda Wolfson in Johnson & Johnson’s consolidated, multidistrict litigation, the trials have seen new developments favoring the pharmaceutical giant.
Through the ruling of a New Jersey court, J&J was allowed to contest the scientific backing behind the cases that declared its talc powder unfit for use. The company will be allowed to have a do-over of its more than 50,000 cases, where it will have the opportunity to defend its iconic baby powder, which had previously come under fire for causing ovarian cancer.
District Judge Michael Shipp came to this decision after the latest modifications that were made to the Federal Rule of Evidence 702. These changes gave more power to judges when it came to disregarding impaired and flawed expert testimonies. An additional justification for necessitating a new hearing came from the introduction of new relevant science, which now also has to be taken into consideration, Judge Shipp explained in a text order.
According to the timeline set up by the judge, motions need to be filed towards the end of July, and opposition is due in late August.
Although talc products by Johnson & Johnson were taken off the market worldwide in 2022, the company has always been adamant in refuting claims of them being cancerous. They did, however, replace its powder with a cornstarch version.
In the last eight months alone, the company brought two lawsuits against four doctors who claimed that the company’s talc products caused mesothelioma, and in the case of its multidistrict litigation, company representatives have even gone as far as to call evidence previously admitted to trail “junk science.”
J&J’s head of litigation, Erik Haas, said in a statement, “The appellate courts of this and other states have recently and repeatedly rejected as flawed and fabricated the opinions of the purported ‘experts’ bought and paid for by the plaintiff’s bar, and the evidence recently revealed has shown the opinions were deliberately designed to defame and deceive.”
The pharmaceutical giant is hopeful that these developments will allow for a verdict similar to that which was reached in a December 2022 ruling that provided Boehringer Ingelheim, Sanofi, and GSK exemption from its more than 50,000 lawsuits in a federal multidistrict case, the subject of which was their heartburn drug Zantac. This decision was also reached by courts after the court in question overturned the scientific findings submitted against the drug previously.
Representatives of the plaintiffs have not expressed a lot of concern in this regard; however, in fact, co-leads of the counsel for the plaintiffs’ steering committee, Michelle Parfitt of Ashcraft Gerel, and Leigh O’Dell of Beasley Allen have claimed that the science proving their claim is stronger than ever.
They explained how the conclusions reached by the experts in the trials were confirmed by regulatory agencies such as the International Agency for the Research on Cancer and Health Canada. For them, the truth of J&J’s unscrupulous medical practices has only become more apparent over time.
