Supreme Court Declines to Revive Mumps Vaccine Antitrust Case Against Merck
Article 0 Comments The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by a group of physicians and healthcare providers to revive their antitrust lawsuit accusing drugmaker Merck of misleading federal regulators to maintain a decades-long monopoly over the mumps vaccine market. The justices turned away an appeal by the plaintiffs of a lower court’s decision to throw out the lawsuit on the basis that the drugmaker was protected under a legal doctrine that immunizes companies from antitrust claims based on actions aimed at swaying government decision-making. A collection of family doctors and physicians’ groups from New Jersey and New York filed the lawsuit in 2012 in federal court in Philadelphia, seeking monetary damages. The claims remaining in the long-running litigation involve allegations that the plaintiffs were overcharged for New Jersey-based Merck’s mumps vaccines as a result of the company’s monopolization of the mumps vaccine market in violation of federal antitrust law and New Jersey and New York state laws. The plaintiffs said that submissions by Merck to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration contained misrepresentations that effectively boxed out competitors such as GlaxoSmithKline and delayed market entry of a rival vaccine for more than a decade. Merck...
