Mylan Agrees to Settle Defamation Suit Against Paper
February 21st, 2012 // 1:32 pm @ jmpickett
Nearly three years after The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a controversial story that indicated Mylan Laboratories employees routinely violated quality-control procedures at a facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, the drugmaker and the newspaper have settled the litigation, according to a joint statement issued by Mylan and the newspaper.
“The Post-Gazette did not find and did not intend to report that Mylan had manufactured or distributed any defective drugs. The Post-Gazette regrets if any reader of the article thought otherwise,†according to the statement, which appears on the Mylan web site. The Post-Gazette article was prompted by an internal Mylan report on the handling of computer-generated warnings about potential manufacturing problems.
The drugmaker subsequently filed two lawsuits, charging the Post-Gazette omitted and distorted facts in the July 2009 article, which reported that Mylan employees regularly overrode computer-generated warnings about potential problems with production, according to the Associated Press. The other lawsuit alleged the paper misappropriated trade secrets, claiming the articles were based on improperly obtained and misconstrued confidential and proprietary documents.
In court documents, The Post-Gazette alleged that Mylan filed suit to obtain information on the confidential sources the paper used. Meanwhile, the FDA investigated Mylan plant shortly after the article appeared and but did not find any “objectionable†deficiencies or evidence that Mylan products had been compromised (back story). Post-Gazette executive editor David Shribman tells the AP that the paper “paid no money to Mylan in the course of this legal action†and “did not reveal any confidential sources.â€
