Current Events

A Missouri appeals court on Tuesday ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay $2.1 billion in damages to women who blamed their ovarian cancers on the company’s talcum products, including its iconic baby powder.

The decision slashed by more than half a record award of $4.69 billion in compensatory and punitive damages to the women, which was made in July 2018.

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The FDA has designated Endologix’ recall of an abdominal stent graft system as a class 1 recall, the most serious kind. The recall affects 5,403 devices (Ovation iX Abdominal Stent Graft Systems) manufactured and distributed in the U.S. since 2015, according to a safety alert from the agency. Read more . . .

One afternoon in early April, Brenda Anagnos crouched in the bushes outside a nursing home in Windsor, Conn., and pressed her face to the window.

“Mommy,” she yelled. “I’m here.”

From outside the locked-down facility, Anagnos said she watched her mother, wearing a red tank top, shiver beneath a hospital sheet.

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For the second time in a week, a maker of Type 2 diabetes drug Metformin announced a recall because the drug might have too much NDMA, a substance that can cause cancer in certain amounts. The FDA said it found too much NDMA (N-Nitrosodimethylamine) in seven lots of Amneal’s Pharmaceuticals Metformin Hydrochloride Extended Release 500 mg, 750 mg tablets. According to the Amneal-written, FDA-posted recall notice, the FDA recommended recalling those seven lots and Amneal decided to yank all unexpired lots on the market.
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(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Thursday it has recommended five pharmaceutical firms to voluntarily recall their diabetes drug metformin after the agency found high levels of a possible cancer-causing impurity in some versions of the medication.

The agency said the drugs contained the probable carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) beyond acceptable limits in their extended-release formulations alone.

NDMA contamination was responsible for the recall of heartburn drug Zantac sold by Sanofi SA and some generic versions of the treatment last year.

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As an unprecedented catastrophe unfolds in which more than 28,000 people have died of Covid-19 in care facilities, the nursing home industry is responding with an unprecedented action of its own: Using its multi-million dollar lobbying machine to secure protections from liability in lawsuits.

At least 20 states have swiftly taken action within the last two and a half months to limit the legal exposure of the politically powerful nursing home industry, which risks huge losses if families of coronavirus victims successfully sue facilities hit by the pandemic. Now, the industry is turning its energies to obtaining nationwide protections from Congress in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. nursing homes have been plagued with infection control deficiencies even before the coronavirus pandemic turned them into hotspots for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, a government report said on Wednesday.

Eighty-two percent of all nursing homes had an infection prevention and control deficiency cited in one or more years from 2013-2017, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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(Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced it would stop selling its talc Baby Powder in the United States and Canada, saying demand had dropped in the wake of what it called “misinformation” about the product’s safety amid a barrage of legal challenges.

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Immunity for corporations when they fail to take basic safety precautions against COVID-19 will cause more American workers and consumers to die and further hamper our economic recovery.

Blanket legal immunity will prolong the pandemic, with some businesses inevitably forgoing basic precautions. Workers and consumers will not return to offices, stores and restaurants if companies cannot be held accountable when they fail to prioritize health and safety. If no one is responsible, no one is safe. People will not go back to their normal routines if they don’t feel safe.

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Nursing homes operated by Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest chains in the industry, violated federal standards meant to stop the spread of infections and communicable diseases even after outbreaks and deaths from covid-19 began to sweep its facilities from the Pacific Northwest to New England, inspection reports show.

Over the past six weeks, as the nationwide death toll among the elderly soared, government inspectors discovered breakdowns in infection control and prevention at at least 10 Life Care nursing homes that underwent covid-19 inspections overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That does not include deficiencies found at the Life Care Center of Kirkland in Washington state, which suffered the country’s first reported outbreak of the novel coronavirus in February.

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There’s a tension at the heart of all of the plans to reopen the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic: The economy needs Americans to get back to work, but workplaces need employees and customers to feel that coming back won’t endanger their health or their lives.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, seems to be concerned primarily with the first half. The biggest obstacle, as he sees it, is not a deadly disease but rapacious trial lawyers, capitalizing on the virus to chase ambulances and bankrupt American businesses.

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