Short Hills, NJ, April 24, 2008 - The law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP announced that on Thursday, April 24 a federal court in Newark, New Jersey unsealed a whistleblower complaint against Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, Bayer Pharmaceuticals Corp., Bayer Corporation, and Bayer A.G., for violations of federal and state False Claims Acts. The Complaint, filed on behalf of the U.S. Government, eleven states and the District of Columbia, and the Relator, a former manager in the Strategic Analysis group for Bayer, alleges that over a three-year period, prior to its withdrawal from the market, Bayer engaged in illegal and deceptive marketing practices in selling Baycol (cerivastatin sodium), a prescription cholesterol drug which was later removed from the market as unsafe. The Complaint alleges Bayer exaggerated Baycol’s efficacy and safety, downplayed its risks, and concealed information about the drug’s dangers from the medical profession, the U.S. Government, and the general public. The Complaint also claims that Bayer paid kickbacks to doctors and other providers to influence them to prescribe Baycol. The Complaint alleges that these prescriptions would never have been written and/or the Government would not have paid for them had it been properly informed. The suit bears similarities to a suit recently jointly filed by the Attorney General of New York and New York City against Merck for similar conduct in the marketing and sale of the drug Vioxx.
The Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP legal team is led by David Stone, head of the firm’s False Claims Practice Area and Administrative Partner of the firm’s New Jersey office. Stone has a decade of experience in prosecuting false claims cases, and has assisted the government in recovering hundreds of millions of dollars from healthcare companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Medco. Stone stated, “When federal and state governments pay for prescription drugs for military personnel, senior citizens, the disadvantaged and others, those drugs must be as safe and effective as the manufacturer says they are. The allegations of the Complaint allege that Bayer misled the government, physicians, and patients about Baycol in order to profit from a product it had reason to believe was less effective than claimed and which was, in some cases, extremely dangerous.”
Stone continued, “Pharmaceutical companies perform a valuable and essential role in developing and testing new drugs and making them available to the public. In this instance, however, Bayer’s deceptive conduct in pursuit of profit not only risked patients’ lives and well-being, but also cost taxpayers millions of healthcare dollars. I have every confidence that our lawyers will aggressively pursue this case, and ultimately get Bayer to pay back the taxpayer funds that it wrongfully obtained.”
Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, founded in 1997, has become one of the nation's premier law firms. It has approximately 240 lawyers in offices located in New York, Washington, D.C., California, Florida, New Hampshire and Nevada. Best known for landmark cases such as United States v. Microsoft, Bush v. Gore, and In re Vitamins, the firm represents some of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the world in their most important matters. Chambers USA, the leading international guide to law firms, has reported on the firm's "‘exceptional' reputation," and called its practice "nationally renowned." The firm has been described by The Wall Street Journal as a "national litigation powerhouse," by the National Law Journal as "unafraid to venture into controversial" and "high risk" matters.
Boies, Schiller & Flexner can be visited on the web at www.bsfllp.com.
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