Pfizer Still Shelling Out For Wyeth's Misdeeds; Pays $784.6m
Executive Summary
Pfizer has agreed to pay $784.6m to the US government and 37 states and the District of Columbia to settle a False Claims Act lawsuit in which its subsidiary Wyeth was accused of reporting false and fraudulent prices to the US Medicaid program, thereby avoiding paying hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates. The settlement is just the latest in a string of such agreements to resolve allegations of Wyeth's misdeeds.
You may also be interested in...
Pfizer atones for Wyeth's misdeeds, again; pays $491m
While the whistleblowers' share has not been resolved in the $491m settlement involving unlawful marketing of Pfizer's Rapamune (sirolimus), the three people who brought the lawsuits against the company's Wyeth unit under the False Claims Act (FCA) stand to gain up to 25%, with a minimum of 15%, of the $257.4m recovered under the civil liability portion of the case.
Pfizer paying out millions, again, to settle off-label promotion charges
Once again, US pharma giant Pfizer found itself having to pay out millions to the US federal government and states to settle charges of illegal promotion of the company's medicines, with the latest settlements totaling about $98 million – a far cry from the $2.3 billion the New York drug maker paid under a 2009 guilty plea for promoting its cyclooxygenase-2-selective nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug Bextra (valdecoxib), but still a tidy sum of cash.
Moderna's Valera Takes mRNA Approach To Combat Zika
With new funding in hand, Moderna and its infectious disease venture Valera are going full-speed ahead with a Zika vaccine, taking an mRNA approach, which they said could be a more rapid strategy to try to stop the disease.