Authoritative and influential individuals recently spoke to the news about a potential Xarelto lawsuit conspiracy. Is there any truth behind their words?

The Xarelto MDL is one of the largest litigation in the recent American history, racking up to 18,000 lawsuits since it started growing in 2014. Thousands of plaintiffs accuse the manufacturers Bayer AG and Janssen Pharmaceutical of releasing to the market a dangerous blood thinner whose side effects could not be controlled because of the absence of a proper antidote. Victims got badly injured after suffering grievous uncontrolled bleedings, and some of them even died after a deadly brain hemorrhage caused them fatal internal wounds. Countless families seek the help of expert attorneys through the country, and brought the pharmaceutical companies to court, knowing (or at least hoping) that they would settle for compensation.

However, the first round of the legal battle didn’t go well for the plaintiffs, and the New Orleans federal jury ruled in favor of the defendants. But what if this first stunning verdict was the product of an alleged conspiracy agreement between the government and the Big Pharma? According to Charles Seife, professor of journalism at New York University, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew very well how much the manufacturers fumbled up with the clinical trials required to prove Xarelto’s safety and effectiveness. The four RECORD studies 1, 2, 3 and 4 that the FDA used to grant approval to rivaroxaban were, in fact, full of widespread errors. They were so full of falsification and misconduct that the agency itself labeled them as “unreliable,” yet the regulators never warned the public (nor the famous science journal The Lancet where the reports were later publishe) about these problems.

According to an interview published on the web by Martha Rosenberg, the few FDA employees who try to rebel against the connivance between regulators and pharmaceutical manufacturers are subjected to retaliation and threats. The agency employed an email monitoring program to actively discourage (and possibly punish) all forms of whistleblowing, preventing the employees from reporting what they see.

Is it possible that a shadier and more uncomfortable truth behind all those product liability litigations that get filed every day in the U.S. courts does actually exist? If the answer is yes, that’s an even more compelling reason to keep filing cases to bring this battle for justice to court and fight to uncover this truth to the public.

Article by Claudio Butticè, Pharm.D.