Xarelto litigation deadline postponed by 3 months

The dates of the upcoming Xarelto lawsuit bellwether trials have been postponed by Judge Eldon Fallon, who also gave potential plaintiffs and their lawyers 90 additional days to file their claims.

The Xarelto Multidistrict Litigation is one of the largest trials against the Big Pharma that is going to be fought in the United States courts. More than 8,000 lawsuits have been filed across the country by patients and their families who seek financial compensation for the damage they sustained after taking the controversial anticoagulant drug.

Currently, to speed up proceedings and efficiently manage the never-ending flow of new disputes that get submitted every day, more than 7,000 cases have been consolidated in a Multidistrict Litigation (MDL Number 2592) in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Another 1,000 instead, have been centralized in a different mass tort class action in Philadelphia. However, since the massive amount of recent claims started to grow to unmanageable proportions, Honorable Judge E. Fallon decided to postpone the deadline to file a Xarelto litigation to February, giving plaintiffs and their attorneys 90 more days before their time runs out because of the statute of limitations.

On September 21, 2016, a new Court update also rescheduled the dates of the imminent bellwether trials. During these trials, the four most representative cases will be heard before a verdict is reached. The Judge amended the Case Management Order (CMO) No. 2 to move the dates to March, April and May 2017 in order to avoid the logistical issues that the forthcoming NBA All-Star Game may cause. The discovery phase of defendants has been concluded by plaintiffs on October 3, 2016.

Xarelto (rivaroxaban) is a new generation oral blood thinner manufactured by Bayer AG and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. After a few years since its approval, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started receiving thousands of complaints from patients who suffered all kind of grievous injuries such as uncontrolled bleedings, internal hemorrhages and strokes that threatened their very lives. Even if rivaroxaban was initially advertised as a safer alternative to the widely established older competitor Warfarin, no antidote to reverse its effects has ever been released to the market. People who found that, did so because they ended up in the emergency room because of simple cuts or ordinary gastrointestinal bleedings. Once there, doctors had no valid protocol to stop their hemorrhage, dooming way too many patients to an inevitable death.

The media outlets from all across the globe that investigated on the matter pointed out the many contradictions and controversies that surrounded the marketing and production of one of the most sold medications in the world. Even the reliability of the ROCKET-AF, the pivotal clinical trial that allegedly proved Xarelto’s safety and effectiveness, has been disputed by both the American and European regulatory agencies. Since 2014, many families of those who lost one of their beloved ones to the effects of this dangerous drug decided to bring their stories in front of a jury. Plaintiffs currently argue that the pharmaceutical companies never warned the public about the purported dangers of Xarelto, and ask for proper compensation for all their sufferings.