The Miller Firm was recently lead counsel in over 5,000 diet drug cases against a major pharmaceutical company, and secured hundreds of millions of dollars for the victims in a pharmaceutical debacle.
The Miller Firm is proud of its work in the Fen-phen field, helping people who have incurred potentially fatal heart valve damage to get fair compensation.
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals had known since 1991 that its diet drugs, Pondimin and Redux, caused the serious side effect of heart valve disease. In 1991, Wyeth began to receive reports through their Adverse Drug Event system from doctors who documented that their patients who had taken Pondimin were being diagnosed with heart valve disease. Even more reports of heart valve disease were received in 1992 and 1993.
Amazingly, in 1994 Wyeth received “clusters” of heart valve disease cases from doctors whose patients had taken Pondimin. In violation of FDA rules, Wyeth intentionally did not report all these critical cases to the FDA. In 1995 even more clusters of heart valve disease cases caused by Pondimin were received. Inexplicably, Wyeth took no action to change the label on their product to warn of this known side effect of heart valve disease.
Wyeth chose to hide the truth about the connection between heart valve disease and their worthless diet drugs until the summer of 1997 when they were forced to publicly acknowledge the truth when a group of independent doctors published a study documenting the devastating damage done to heart valves as a result of the use of Pondimin and Redux. Almost immediately after the publication of the study Pondimin and Redux were pulled off the market by the FDA. Since that time Wyeth has spent over $80,000,000 for “medical” studies and billions of dollars in defending these lawsuits and attempting to hide the truth.
All who have heart valve disease because of Pondimin or Redux will require yearly medical monitoring including echocardiograms, and sadly, many will require open heart surgery to replace their diseased heart valve.
Unfortunately, today’s jurors will never hear the most convincing evidence of Wyeth’s wrongful conduct—of how they intentionally hid the truth from the FDA, physicians and the public, and put profit over people. Today’s trials are limited to proof of simple negligence and damages. Despite these limitations, juries around the country are seeing through Wyeth’s efforts to defend these indefensible drugs and returning fair and reasonable verdicts.