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Gigi Jordan, the millionaire pharmaceutical executive convicted of manslaughter in the death of her 8-year-old son, was found dead inside her Brooklyn home in what cops are investigating as a possible suicide...Her body was found around 12:30 a.m. Friday... just hours after US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an order that was expected to send Jordan, 62, back to prison...Jordan was accused of force-feeding her autistic son, Jude Mirra, a lethal dose of pills in February 2010...READ MORE

In a development in what’s being billed as one of the largest healthcare fraud schemes ever, a federal grand jury yesterday convicted the owner of a laboratory that performs sophisticated genetic tests of bilking Medicare out of hundreds of millions of dollars...The crime involved telemarketers allegedly lying to Medicare recipients by ensuring them that they were covered for expensive genetic cancer tests...Telemedicine physicians allegedly approved the tests even though they hadn’t treated the patients and, in many cases, hadn’t even spoken to them. The DOJ said dozens of suspects might be involved in the scheme in which $463 million in questionable claims were made to Medicare...READ MORE

In addressing a mountain of price-fixing claims in the United States, Teva has shown a preference for dealing with charges on a state-by-state basis...Teva agreed to settle with Georgia for $3.346 million, the company checked a third state off its price-fixing litigation list and then crowed about the success of its strategy...The agreement comes on top of settling price-fixing claims with Mississippi last year for $925,000 and with Louisiana five months ago for $1.45 million...The figures are relatively modest compared to the $420 million Teva agreed to pay investors earlier this year who alleged that the company concealed a price-fixing scheme which allowed it to raise the cost of some of its drugs by more than 1,000%...The allegations came to light three years ago when 43 states sued 20 generic drugmakers for divvying up markets and raising prices on more than 100 drugs...READ MORE

A group of 23 state attorneys general led by Florida told a federal court on Monday that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacks the legal authority to impose a nationwide transportation mask mandate to address COVID-19...The CDC sought "an unprecedented masking mandate regulating every breath of millions of Americans," said the brief in support of the group that sued to overturn the mask mandate...The group, which included Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, urged the appeals court to reject the CDC "overreach."...READ MORE

In yet another turn in the high-profile Zantac litigation, Sanofi and Pfizer agreed to settle a case set for trial in California...which comes after a U.S. District Judge ruled against the plaintiffs in the federal group of cases against the companies and others. Earlier this month, that ruling took out about 50,000 Zantac claims off the board.As for the California settlement, that lawsuit came in California Superior Court for Alameda County...The financial terms of the agreement were not revealed...READ MORE

The convicted ex-CEO of blood-testing startup Theranos got a multi-year prison term Friday. Prosecutors had sought a term with deterrent effect...Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted 10 months ago of defrauding investors in the blood-testing startup Theranos, was sentenced Friday to 11 years and two months in prison followed by three years of supervised release...Judge Edward Davila, who also presided over Holmes’ four-year criminal fraud case and her four-month trial in U.S. District Court in San Jose, said the case was “troubling on so many levels,” as he handed down the sentence...“Failure is normal. But failure by fraud is not OK,”...READ MORE

After more than two decades of violating state law, the Nevada Board of Pharmacy must remove cannabis from a list of controlled substances deemed to be highly abused, a Clark County District Court judge ruled...The order followed a lawsuit brought forward in April by the Cannabis, Equity and Inclusion Community on behalf of Antoine Poole, a Las Vegas resident who was convicted of felony possession of a controlled substance for marijuana in 2017. The conviction occurred the same year recreational marijuana use became legal in Nevada...READ MORE

The former Sparks fire chief accused of illegal possession and distribution of steroids says he never gave his resignation and wants to be reinstated...Mark Lawson’s lawyers said in a letter sent to Sparks officials this week he should be returned to his role and placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of his criminal case...They said Lawson maintains his innocence and threatened to file a civil lawsuit alleging he was “condemned, terminated and tried in the public” before criminal charges had been filed. But he is confident the criminal complaint will be dismissed...READ MORE

CVS reported a quarterly loss of more than $3 billion to cover its share of a global opioid settlement, but its third-quarter earnings blew past Wall Street estimates...The pharmacy retail giant said that it had a $5.2 billion charge in the third quarter for a settlement relating to its role in the opioid crisis. The settlement resolves "substantially all opioid lawsuits and claims filed by other states, political subdivisions and tribes against the company to be paid over 10 years, beginning in 2023...READ MORE

In another opioid-related settlement for Johnson & Johnson, the company has agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle litigation in New Hampshire...The state sued the company back in 2018, alleging that J&J's subsidiaries “aggressively marketed” opioid painkillers and falsely hawked them as safer than alternatives. Now, just before a trial was set to begin next week, J&J agreed to pay the state $40.5 million...READ MORE