Johnson & Johnson (J&J) paid kickbacks to Omnicare Inc to push prescriptions for its antipsychotic drug Risperdal for elderly patients, the US said on Friday in a lawsuit.
The US said J&J and two subsidiaries paid millions of dollars to induce Omnicare, the largest US pharmacy for nursing home patients, to buy and recommend J&J drugs including Risperdal. The government alleges that J&J knew doctors accepted Omnicare pharmacists’ recommendations more than 80 percent of the time.
“Kickbacks such as those alleged here distort the judgment of health care professionals and put profits ahead of sound medical treatment,” said Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division.
The drugmaker viewed Omnicare’s pharmacists as “an extension of [J&J’s] sales force,” the US said, quoting an internal document.
From 1999 to 2004, J&J used various forms of kickbacks “including market share rebate payments conditioned on Omnicare engaging in ‘active intervention’ programs for J&J drugs,” the US said in its complaint filed on Friday in federal court in Boston. These payments “were ostensibly for the purchase of Omnicare data, and various ‘grants’ and other payments, all of which J&J intended to induce Omnicare to purchase and to recommend J&J drugs.”
Last month the government joined two lawsuits filed previously by whistleblowers.
“We are reviewing the complaint filed today [Friday] and will address the government’s lawsuit in court,” Jeff Leebaw, a J&J spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. “We believe airing the facts will confirm that our conduct, including rebating programs like those the government now challenges, was lawful and appropriate.”
As a result of kickbacks during these years, “Omnicare engaged in intensive efforts to convince physicians to prescribe J&J drugs and Omnicare’s annual purchases of J&J drugs increased from approximately US$100 million to over US$280 million, with annual purchases of Risperdal alone rising to over US$100 million,” the US said.
Omnicare, based in Covington, Kentucky, agreed on Nov. 3 to pay US$98 million to settle civil allegations by the US government and various states that it took kickbacks from J&J. Omnicare, which didn’t admit liability, entered into a five-year corporate integrity agreement as part of the settlement.
Meanwhile, J&J expanded on Friday a Tylenol recall after US federal authorities warned the company was being too slow in dealing with a public health threat.
The expanded recall covers the pain reliever and other over-the-counter drugs sold in the Americas, the United Arab Emirates and Fiji.
McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a unit of J&J, said it was voluntarily recalling about 500 lots of the products, which include pain relievers Tylenol, Motrin and St Joseph, a children’s aspirin.
The company already had recalled last month all lots of a type of Tylenol product in response to consumer complaints of a foul odor that in some cases had prompted “non-serious” gastrointestinal disorders including vomiting and diarrhea.
McNeil said an investigation had shown the “unusual moldy” odor is caused by the presence of trace amounts of a chemical called 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA).
“This can result from the breakdown of a chemical that is sometimes applied to wood that is used to build wood pallets that transport and store product packaging materials,” the company said. “The health effects of this chemical have not been well studied but no serious events have been documented in the medical literature.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained