Drug Companies New Liability Determinations
Abbott Laboratories sits in limbo with their pending suit over allegedly insufficient warnings on their products. However after a panel decision in November, drug manufacturers in Illinois may end up with less of a “liability buffer” than before in failure-to-warn states. panel of Justices recently accepted a request from Abbott Laboratories to hear a doctrine which provides evidence showing that drug manufacturers “cannot be held liable for failing to properly warn patient about their drugs’ risk if they provide that information to physicians in turn who prescribe the medication.”
Gretchen Harris Sperry of Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, said “From a procedural perspective, it basically turned the analysis on its head and conflates the standard for analyzing medical malpractice claims,” said Sperry. “It puts pharmaceutical manufacturers in an extraordinarily difficult position to write drug labels and not be able to rely on the doctors to interpret them.”
