In the wake of a lawsuit from the anti-vaccine nonprofit group U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy founded, HHS is reviving a vaccine safety task force that’s been lifeless for nearly three decades.
Doing his version of the Texas Two-Step, Texas Attorney General (AG) Ken Paxton is again shuffling Eli Lilly and Co. into a state courtroom – this time for allegedly overstepping the anti-kickback line.
Kingsley Chin, the CEO of Spinefrontier Inc., has been sentenced to a year of supervised release for his role in the payment of less than $5,000 in consulting fees to a surgeon who provided no consulting services.
Drug companies and organizations challenging the Medicare drug negotiations have yet to convince a U.S. court that the process, mandated by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, violates the Constitution. The most recent decisions came this week when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Aug. 7 against Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH and the Sixth Circuit ruled Aug. 6 against a challenge filed by the Dayton, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber, and the Ohio and Michigan Chambers.
A federal appeals court opened the door Aug. 6 for an amended class-action lawsuit alleging that Astrazeneca plc, Eli Lilly and Co., Novo Nordisk A/S and Sanofi SA engaged in a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy involving insulin products and GLP-1 drugs indicated in diabetes when they each adopted similar policies in 2020 to impose restrictions on 340B discounts to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies.
Janssen Pharmaceutical’s loss in a False Claims Act (FCA) case for the company’s HIV treatments resulted in judgments of roughly $1.6 billion – an outcome the company appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
It’s not surprising that, of all the recommendations the U.S. CDC’s vaccine advisory board made at its June meeting, the first one Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy signed off on would essentially remove thimerosal from influenza vaccines in the U.S. What is surprising is the time it took for him to do so, given his long-held position on the preservative used in multidose vials and his insistence that a thimerosal presentation and vote be added to the agenda.
The U.S. False Claims Act (FCA) is not the only statute governing the submission of false claims to federal agencies thanks to the more than 30 states with their own versions of the FCA. However, the federal government is providing states with more incentives to amplify their FCA-related activities, a development that raises the stakes for companies in the life sciences.
Led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, several medical groups went to court July 7 to force Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy to restore the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children ages 6 months to 17 years.
Finding they were “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedures Act, the District Court for the District of Columbia vacated a White House Office of Personnel Management memo and a subsequent Department of Health and Human Services’ guidance intended to implement President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order pertaining to gender ideology.