Is Causing Injury to Patients Just a Cost of Doing Business?

On Behalf of | Jun 27, 2012 | Defective Drugs, Defective Medical Devices |

As Bloomberg News reports, the medical device maker Johnson & Johnson was told by U.S. authorities to stop marketing its vaginal mesh implant – but went ahead and continued to sell it for a whole nine months afterwards.

Some might say this is typical of the medical device and pharmaceutical industry generally. We wrote about something similar last week about Pradaxa, whose maker said that adverse events are known to occur in the first few years of new pharmaceuticals brought to market.

In other words, patient outcomes aren’t always so hot, even when the medical devices and pharmaceuticals they are given are supposed to be safe, and it seems as though this is an accepted cost of doing business.

Of course, part of doing business is making a profit, which might have been what Johnson & Johnson was trying to do when it continued to sell its defective product for nine months after it was told to stop, according to Bloomberg News.

During those nine months, Johnson & Johnson was engaged in “negotiations” with the FDA. Apparently, it thought that it would be okay to keep selling the pelvic mesh while they haggled with the FDA over whether or not it was safe enough to market.

The problem is that while that was happening, plenty of women were getting injured.

SourceJohnson & Johnson kept selling vaginal mesh implants after warnings