Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Supreme Court Slams Big Pharma? Not Exactly.

Corante, Mar. 25, 2011

The Supreme Court came down with a decision the other day (Matrixx Initiatives v. Siracusano) that the headlines say will have an impact on the drug industry. Looking at it, though, I don't see how anything's changed.

The silly-named Matrixx is the company that made Zicam, the zinc-based over-the-counter cold remedy that was such a big seller a few years back. You may or may not remember what brought it down - reports that some people suffered irreversible loss of their sense of smell after using the product. That's a steep price to pay for what may or may not have been any benefit at all (I never found the zinc-for-colds data very convincing, not that there were a lot of hard numbers to begin with).

This case grew out of a shareholder lawsuit, which alleged (as shareholder lawsuits do) that the company knew that there was trouble coming and had insufficiently informed its investors in time to keep them from losing buckets of their money.

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