A magistrate judge at the Northern District of California has ruled that a pharmaceutical company, accused of selling medicine that caused kidney and bone damage, doesn’t have to provide specific data requested concerning more than 900 plaintiffs.
Adrian Holley and a host of others took legal action against Gilead Sciences Inc., alleging that they have all “suffered unnecessary kidney and bone damage” after taking Gilead’s drugs, which included tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF)," according to the lawsuit. They allege “Gilead’s failure to provide adequate warnings and its decision to develop drugs containing TDF, rather than the safer compound, tenofovir alafenamide fumarate (TAF)."
While the plaintiffs and Gilead had agreed that the company would provide “fact sheets” related to its contact list and its interactions with the plaintiffs' doctors, the volume of the sheets was at the center of the dispute. The group of documents that Gilead agreed to present dates back to 2013 but doesn’t include much of the time frame in question.
In order to fulfill that request, Gilead would need to go over each plaintiff’s information, such as details about their doctors. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley noted that not only are there more than 900 plaintiffs, but many of them also have more than one doctor. She ruled that Gilead isn’t refusing to provide information and pointed out that it has already produced several pieces of promotional material, which serves as proof of what Gilead told the physicians about the medicine.
Even though Gilead had yet to search specific emails that were sent to particular physicians before 2013, Judge Corley refused to make Gilead do so.
She wrote, “Plaintiffs fail to show that the discovery they seek is proportional to the needs of the case, as its relevance, at least at this stage, is minimal.”
She added that if a physician takes the stand in the future, plaintiffs should be aware of their connection to Gilead. But as of now, there’s no forewarning that each of the physicians, which number in the thousands, will actually testify. “The more burdensome searches can wait until the pool of potential witnesses (and bellwether plaintiffs) is narrowed,” wrote Judge Corley.
At the same time, Gilead was ordered to provide responsive documents for the three extra scientists concerning October 2004 through Jan. 1, 2009. It also said it would provide responsive Board of Director’s papers up until Dec. 31, 2016.