The hidden Zyprexa evidence is said to be worse than that revealed on Vioxx and Dr Furber's interview provides good insight into why Lilly would early on agree to pay a $690 million settlement to the first round of Zyprexa plaintiffs, which allowed the company to keep the damaging evidence buried.
According to Lilly, the company has produced approximately 11 million documents and the court has, without any stated reasons, allowed Lilly to designate all 11 million as confidential pursuant to Case Management Order 3, an August 9, 2004, protective order.
Attorneys involved in the case say Lilly was even permitted to designate reports and articles about Zyprexa that appeared in the media as confidential.
In mid-December 2006, Alaskan attorney, Jim Gottstein, obtained some of the sealed documents by issuing a subpoena for Dr David Egilman, another expert witness who evaluated the Zyprexa documents for a law firm in the underlying litigation, to appear for a deposition.
As soon as he received the documents, Mr Gottstein set out to publicize the information by immediately providing copies to journalists and authors including Dr Peter Breggin, Dr Grace Jackson, Dr David Cohen, Dr Stefan Kruszewski, Judy Chamberlin, Vera Sherav, Robert Whitaker, and Alex Berenson at the New York Times.
When articles began appearing in the Times, Lilly obtained an injunction that required Mr Gottstein to return the documents and identify everyone they were disclosed to.
After Lilly received the names, on December 29, 2006, the court issued a second temporary injunction to prohibit the dissemination of the documents by Terrie Gottstein, Jerry Winchester, Will Hall, Bruce Whittington, and Laura Ziegler.
The injunction also barred the disclosure of the information about Zyprexa by many of the most well-known experts on psychiatric drugs in the US, who are also journalists and authors, to include Dr Peter Breggin, Dr Grace Jackson, Dr David Cohen, Dr Stefan Kruszewski, Judy Chamberlin, Vera Sherav, and Robert Whitaker.
At Lilly's request, in early January, 2007, more names were added to the injunction including two websites belonging to the consumer protection and patient advocacy organization, the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), at www.ahrp.org and www.ahrp.blogspot.com, and the web site of the international patient advocacy organization, MindFreedom, at www.mindfreedom.org, and Eric Whalen and his web site at www.joysoup.net.
The name of New York Times reporter, Alex Berenson, the only journalist who actually quoted from the documents in the press was not included in any injunction. Lilly in fact never asked for an injunction against the Times, and Judge Jack Weinstein announced in one hearing that he was not going to issue an injunction against the Times.
However, for the others journalist, the litigation process has dragged out at snail's pace and Lilly has been successful in getting the court to bar them from discussing or writing about the public health risk created by the continued off-label prescribing of Zyprexa.
Attorney, Alan Milstein, representing Ms Sharav, the AHRP, and Dr Cohen, has filed a motion asking the judge to unseal the documents in question from the original protective order on the grounds that they should not have been designated confidential to begin with.
At a January 17, 2007, hearing Mr Milstein told Judge Weinstein that the documents are critically important to saving human lives, to prevent human suffering and "this Court should in no way assist Lilly in keeping them from the public."
The above statement by Mr Milstein is not an exaggeration. According to recently updated estimates by Allen Jones, a former Medicaid fraud investigator, in considering the $10 billion a year spent on atypicals in the US, the death rate would be close to one patient per $162,000 spent on Zyprexa, or nearly six deaths for every million.
Lilly is now seeking civil and criminal contempt charges against Mr Gottstein and Dr Egilman for their part in warning the public, which Mr Gottstein admits will hopefully have a negative impact on the sale of Zyprexa for unapproved uses.
Dr Egilman has recently notified Lilly that he will not be attending what could be seen as his own funeral in refusing to testify against himself at a deposition based on his right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.
A big hurdle with the Zyprexa issue is Lilly's credibility over their continuous PR on how they are going to pay out $1.2 billion in damages.As long as they keep up this rhetoric and don't actually pay the issue won't go away.
Think about the need to 'put their money where their mouth is'.
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Daniel Haszard
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Danny Haszard (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 52 comments)
on Monday, February 5, 2007 at 11:34:19 AM
