Florida district court grants Sanofi, GSK summary judgment of Zantac suits
The Fly

Florida district court grants Sanofi, GSK summary judgment of Zantac suits

U.S. District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg stated in a ruling regarding Zantac products liability litigation posted to the site of the court: "This multidistrict litigation is about Zantac heartburn medication or, more particularly, the molecule marketed under the label name of Zantac: ranitidine. Ranitidine is no longer sold in the United States and many other parts of the world because, in the spring of 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requested that the manufacturers of ranitidine voluntarily recall their products and cease all future sales. All manufacturers complied. The voluntary recall of ranitidine is a logical starting point for the facts underlying this MDL, but it is not the best starting point… Thus, at first blush it may appear surprising that, notwithstanding the FDA’s voluntary recall of ranitidine, the Court grants the Defendants’ Daubert motions in full and strikes the Plaintiffs’ experts… Here, there is no scientist outside this litigation who concluded ranitidine causes cancer, and the Plaintiffs’ scientists within this litigation systemically utilized unreliable methodologies with a lack of documentation on how experiments were conducted, a lack of substantiation for analytical leaps, a lack of statistically significant data, and a lack of internally consistent, objective, science-based standards for the evenhanded evaluation of data. This Order is over 300 pages because the Court has endeavored to carefully explain each reason why the Plaintiffs’ experts have utilized unreliable methodologies to reach their conclusions… Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56 requires a court to grant summary judgment for a moving party when the party proves that there is no genuine dispute of material fact and that the party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. In a products liability MDL, the plaintiff must have admissible primary evidence with which to establish general causation. See Chapman, 766 F.3d at 1308, 1316. As a result, if the plaintiff does not have this evidence, then there is no genuine dispute of material fact, and the defendant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Following the release of the ruling, shares of Sanofi are up about 6% in trading in New York, while shares of GSK are up 8%.

Published first on TheFly

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