A jury awarded $28 million in punitive damages in Pennsylvania state court to a plaintiff who claimed her use of Pfizer Inc.'s hormone-therapy drugs caused breast cancer. The jury had awarded $6.3 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiff, Donna Kendall, of Decatur, IL. The jury found that Pfizer units had engaged in a pattern of willful and reckless conduct. Wyeth was the primary seller of hormone-therapy drugs, and Pfizer recently acquired the company. A separate Pfizer unit, Upjohn, was a defendant in the case.
A new Novartis AG vaccine plant in North Carolina is supposed to boost the U.S.' ability to fight pandemics like the current swine-flu virus. But despite a ribbon-cutting Tuesday, it won't be pumping out flu shots for at least another two years. Nor will the plant's cutting-edge technology do much to solve one of the biggest problems vaccine makers have faced in churning out this year's swine-flu vaccine: a slow-growing virus. High-speed techniques that bypass the lengthy and onerous process of incubating viruses to make vaccine are years away. After more than five years and about $2 billion in government spending, the U.S. is still struggling to modernize and speed up production of vaccinations against deadly pandemics like swine flu. The system is undermined by a lack of manufacturing plants and by decades-old technology that takes six to nine months to make flu vaccine.
In a news conference on Tuesday aimed at pressuring swing-vote senators, leaders of the National Farmers Union, which represents about 250,000 farm and ranch families, stressed the importance of major healthcare legislation to agricultural workers in Arkansas, Maine, and Nebraska. Those states, of course, were carefully chosen. Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, voted on Saturday to move forward with debate on the healthcare bill. But she has threatened to oppose it if big changes are not made. Lincoln has voiced particular concern over a proposed government-run health insurance plan, or public option, that would compete with private insurers.
Despite pleas from the White House, some Democratic activists are gearing up for a renewed onslaught against ... Democrats. Democracy for America, the liberal grassroots political action committee founded by Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and governor of Vermont, is appealing for money to continue its campaign against what it calls "Insurance Industry Democrats." They include Senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The two joined a party-line vote Saturday to allow the Senate to begin debating healthcare legislation. But they have vowed to oppose one of its key elements—the creation of a government-run insurance plan, known as a public option, to compete with private insurers.
If the Senate were going to write a new rule for Medicare payments meant to slow the growth of medical costs, you might think that the rule would apply to hospitals and doctors. A fair amount of medical care is, after all, provided by hospitals and doctors. But the Senate's health reform bill exempts hospitals from just such a rule until 2019. Doctors, meanwhile, are likely to be effectively exempt, the Congressional Budget Office says. And come 2019, a separate part of the rule will change, making the entire thing mostly moot. This odd situation is just one of the opportunities that awaits those senators who don't yet seem to have a firm position on health reform.
Canadian doctors have been advised not to use a batch of 170,000 doses of swine flu vaccine while authorities investigate reports of allergic reactions among recipients, drug maker GlaxoSmithKline PLC said Tuesday. Authorities routinely monitor vaccines for any signals of problems, such as the allergic reactions that do occur, rarely, every year. Company spokeswoman Gwenan White said that GlaxoSmithKline advised medical staff in Canada last week to refrain from using one batch of the vaccine while they look into reports that that it might have caused more allergic reactions than normal. GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second largest drug maker by revenue, is only investigating the one batch of its swine flu vaccine in Canada. White said no other doses of its swine flu vaccine around the world are affected.