PHILADELPHIA — Attorneys involved in the $3.75 billion fen-phen settlement are asking a federal judge to halt all payouts, citing "a mass filing of overstated claims" that threatens to deplete a fund set up to pay people who were genuinely harmed by taking the once-popular diet drug.
The request for an all-out freeze on payouts was made less than a week after a federal judge froze payments of fen-phen money specifically to people represented by two New York law firms.
Attorneys for the lead class plaintiffs and drugmaker Wyeth allege that those firms and two doctors they use ran a "production line" that resulted in hundreds of "medically unreasonable" claims — and that they could just be the tip of a multimillion-dollar iceberg of fraudulent settlements.
"The high concentration of filings by a small number of law firms, who have advertised extensively and appear to have conducted en masse echocardiographic screening of their clients . . . presents the danger of systematic abuse," they stated in a motion filed this week.
U.S. District Judge Harvey J. Bartle III has already temporarily halted all payouts in those firms' cases pending the outcome of an upcoming hearing.
The attorneys want fen-phen payments stopped altogether until Bartle retools the process so that all claims are subject to an audit and that only board-certified cardiologists can evaluate the echocardiogram scans.
American Home Products Corp., which has since changed its name to Wyeth, made Pondimin, the fenfluramine half of fen-phen, and Redux, a chemical cousin. About 6 million people took the drugs before they were pulled from the market in September 1997 amid evidence they caused heart-valve damage in some patients. Phentermine, the other drug in the combination, was not implicated in the problems.
Soon after fen-phen was pulled from the market, thousands of state and federal lawsuits were filed against American Home Products on behalf of patients who had developed heart valve problems or feared they might in the future.
AHP set aside $13.2 billion in recent years to cover claims and court costs. As of Aug. 15, its settlement trust had paid out $840 million of a total of $947 million that it so far has approved to be distributed to people whose claims have been validated, Andrew A. Chirls, a lawyer representing the trust, said Thursday.
Under a settlement affirmed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2001, claimants who took the once-popular diet drugs could be compensated based on a "matrix" formula involving their age and how much their health was damaged, if at all.
In a separate filing, attorneys for the trust asked Bartle to take additional steps against the two law firms he froze payments against, saying hundreds of their claims were "medically unreasonable" and have cost the trust $7 million.
Attorneys for Wyeth and each of the attorneys' groups declined to comment Thursday, citing the pending litigation.