Chief Medical Officer Blows Whistle on Johnson & Johnson
The former Chief Medical Officer of Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon, Inc., has sued the company for wrongful dismissal, claiming he was fired unlawfully for insisting on recalls of products because of health and safety concerns.
Dr. Joel Lippman’s suit in a Middlesex County, N.J. court claims that during his 15 years in high ranking medical positions at Ethicon and Ortho McNeil, another J&J division, the company repeatedly released or refused to recall dangerous products to which he objected, including the Ortho Evra birth control patch, Intergel, Panacryl Sutures and others that have since spurred hundreds of product liability lawsuits.
Lippman says he objected to the release of the Panacryl suture, “whose use resulted in numerous adverse events,” but Ortho released it anyway and continued to receive reports of “adverse events.” He says he objected to the release of ProCeed, a “mesh product,” but Ortho released it anyway, until the FDA forced a recall. He says he told Ethicon it must inform surgeons that an endoscopic applicator leaks chromium during use, but Ethicon refused. He says he was fired less than a month after insisting that Ethicon recall a product called DFK24, used in heart bypass surgery, because its tip fell off and had to be fished out of the aorta.
Lippman, who was vice president of clinical trials at Ortho-McNeil and worldwide vice president of medical affairs at Ethicon before he was fired on May 15, 2006, alleges he began having problems at J&J after he called attention to product safety problems and serious health risks linked to Ortho Evra, “which released dangerously high levels of estrogen into patients,” according to the lawsuit.
He claims that from 1998 to 2000, his last two years at Ortho, he “raised serious health concerns about two pharmaceutical products: Ortho-Prefest, a hormonal menopausal product, which did not have adequate safety data to prove that it protected against uterine cancer as did other therapies, and the Evra patch, which released dangerously high levels of estrogen into patients. The clinical research had revealed that the estrogen dose released by the Evra patch as a means of birth control may increase the risk of deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms.”
J&J in a statement said Lippman was fired “as a result of inappropriate conduct and mismanagement of responsibilities unrelated to the allegations he raises in the lawsuit.”
Lippman’s attorney Bruce McMoran said, “We would hope that the bringing of this type of suit would encourage companies not to retaliate against employees who blow the whistle.”