Plaintiffs Urge Appellate Revival of Zostavax Shingles Suits

Plaintiffs Urge Appellate Revival of Zostavax Shingles Suits

Introduction

Hundreds of plaintiffs have requested the federal court to reinstate their Zostavax shingles lawsuits which were earlier dismissed by the judge due to lack of evidence.

In each of the claims, Merck, manufacturer of Zostavax shingles was accused of being responsible for the plaintiffs' development of severe variations of the ailment that the shingles vaccination was meant to prevent.

Even though such testing was never done and cannot be done after the fact, the U.S. District Judge presiding over the litigation required each plaintiff to provide PCR evidence establishing that their shingles was linked to the live strain of the virus contained in the vaccine before allowing the cases to proceed.

As the first shingles vaccine licensed for use in the United States, Merck released Zostavax in 2006. It featured a single injection containing a live virus that was meant to stop the onset of the uncomfortable illness. The vaccine was allegedly designed improperly and poses an unreasonable risk because the live virus was not sufficiently weakened, leading to more severe and prolonged shingles outbreaks in some users as well as a number of neurological issues, autoimmune diseases, vision loss, and hearing loss, according to lawsuits.

All Zostavax lawsuits have been consolidated before a U.S. District Judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as part of federal multidistrict litigation (MDL), where several groups of "bellwether" cases involving various categories of injuries were prepared for trial. This was done because similar questions of fact and law were raised in complaints filed throughout the federal court system.

A "Group A" bellwether pool handled around 1,200 cases involving individuals who claimed they had injuries or acquired shingles after getting the injection. As a result of the Court excluding expert witness testimony connecting the live virus vaccination to the reactivation of the shingles virus that had been dormant in recipients, the court dismissed all Group A cases involving shingles litigation after pretrial discovery.

As a result, the only cases remaining active in the MDL are those involving injuries that are part of a "Group B" bellwether pool for plaintiffs who developed other autoimmune disorders, such as postherpetic neuralgia, acute disseminated encephalopmyelitis (ADEM), paralysis, traverse myelitis, meningitis, hemorrhagic strokes and other injuries, or a "Group C" pool, for individuals who developed hearing loss from Zostavax.