Roche’s bid to strike a $1.5 billion False Claims Act suit around Tamiflu’s pandemic stockpiling has failed.
A Maryland federal judge on Monday denied Roche’s motion to dismiss a suit that alleges the Swiss pharma defrauded U.S. federal and state governments by misrepresenting the popular influenza med for use in a pandemic.
The suit was brought by epidemiologist and Cochrane Collaboration researcher Tom Jefferson in 2014. After six years of tussle, Roche still can’t escape the suit.
Jefferson and the nonprofit Cochrane launched their Tamiflu war in 2009 after the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The team embarked on a years-long campaign, urging Roche to release all Tamiflu data so that Cochrane could assess the drug’s clinical value.
Cochrane went so far as to push for a boycott of the seasonal flu drug. Roche said it released related data in late 2012.
Based on those data, Jefferson concluded that Tamiflu could reduce the duration of flu symptoms as well as the number of symptomatic cases among infected people.
But Jefferson didn’t find evidence that Tamiflu cut the risk of disease transmission or lower respiratory complications—which, according to him, are key goals for a pandemic drug. He blamed that lack of evidence on trial design loopholes.
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