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July 09, 2003

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

“Glaxo Settles Lyme Disease Vaccine Suit”

Philadelphia Inquirer (www.philly.com) (07/09/03) P. B3; Shea, Kathleen Brady

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British company formed in the merger between Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, has agreed to an out-of-court settlement with class-action plaintiffs who had received the Lyme disease vaccine Lymerix that was manufactured by SmithKline Beecham.  Yet the monetary settlement of more than $1 million will probably not reach any of the vaccine’s recipients, as it is to be split up among the plaintiffs’ attorneys.  Said attorney Stephen A. Sheller, the case was not about “putting hundreds of millions of dollars” in the hands of plaintiffs but “to warn the public about the vaccine.”  Sheller said that the main goal of the suits was to change the labeling for Lymerix to warn patients about the vaccine’s possible side effects, but GSK stopped selling Lymerix in February 2002, saying that the commercial benefits from selling Lymerix were no longer great enough to justify marketing the product, not that the lawsuit was any factor.  Sheller claims that between 25 percent and 30 percent of the population is susceptible to treatment-resistant arthritis after receiving the vaccine, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagrees with that suggestion.