While the drug Chantix, Pfizer’s smoking cessation drug, has previously been linked to reports of incidents of violence and suicide, the prevalence of the problem may have been vastly underreported according to the Institute for Safe Medicine Practices, a non-profit drug company watchdog organization. While the serious adverse events were previously reported, they were reported according to procedures that permitted them to be hidden amongst minor adverse reactions. Pfizer reported hundreds of serious adverse reactions to the FDA through a process that lumped the serious adverse events in with reports of 26,000 minor adverse reactions.

The problems for Johnson and Johnson are piling up, including recalls of acetaminophen related to severe liver damage and contamination issues which resulted in a shutdown of a McNeil Consumer Healthcare Plant in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Following a growing number of recalls of Tylenol products, the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") issued a more widely seen and publicly accessible medical alert for contaminated versions of Tylenol last month.

The news has been filled with accounts of the mounting number of lawsuits filed against Bayer AG related to the serious side effects of Yaz, including gallbladder disease, pulmonary embolism and stroke. Thousands of individual lawsuits have been filed, and there is now a national Yaz gallbladder class-action lawsuit. These individual cases have been consolidated into what is referred to as “multi-district” litigation where a single judge oversees certain aspects of the cases.