Three people who’ve been seriously injured as a result of defective cardiac defibrillators and their component parts manufactured by medical device maker Medtronic Inc. have sued the company for hiding data on the risks they posed to patients, and their lawsuit fails to mince words.
According to a report at MassDevice.com, a class-action lawsuit has been filed against Medtronic on behalf of three recipients of Medtronic’s Entrust pacemaker device and the Sprint Fidelis leads connecting it to a person’s heart. The Plaintiffs in the lawsuit thus far are three men, one each from Alabama, Florida, and Missouri.
The lawsuit against Medtronic accuses the company of “criminal conspiracy, deceptive business practices, and commercial bribery” in the marketing of these defective cardiac defibrillators and their defective lead wires. The lawsuit names the company and several current and former executives of the company in leveling serious charges against it and them. The report cites the lawsuit filed this week:
“Medtronic management with the timely acquiescence of the board members knowingly, intentionally, ruthlessly, recklessly, and with total indifference and disregard for human life (third degree murder in Minnesota) dumped thousands of potentially defective, extremely dangerous and perhaps fatal Medtronic defibrillators into an unsuspecting market (the stream of interstate commerce) while at the same time bribing physicians to recommend and implant the faulty cardiac devices.”
Further, the lawsuit claims that each patient who was implanted with the Entrust pacemaker and Sprint Fidelis leads were “bilked” out of approximately $80,000 because at the time, Medtronic was well aware that each held the potential to cause serious injuries and potentially death to patients. The claim states that the company passed off recipients of these devices as “old folks living on borrowed time” but when they all eventually realized that their defective defibrillators may be putting them at risk of death, they were further hurt by “mental terror and long-term anxiety” with the risks posed by having these devices removed.
Even though the Entrust and Sprint Fidelis devices are known to be defective and have injured others in the past, the risks may be just as equal when deciding whether or not to have an alternative device implanted.
According to the report, the lawsuit names the following Medtronic executives and members of its Board of Directors as Defendants: former CEO William Hawkins; current CFO Gary Ellis; former chief regulatory officer Susan Alpert; chief ethics and compliance officer Kathleen Erickson DiGiorno; Senior Vice President for medicine and technology Dr. Stephen Oesterle; and directors Richard Anderson, Shirley Ann Jackson, DeniseO’leary, Robert Pozen, and Jack Schuler.
Each Plaintiff in the lawsuit is seeking between $80,000 and $200,000 in damages.
