$100M settlement reached in NuvaRing litigation

Merck & Co. has officially settled with thousands of plaintiffs relating to the NuvaRing contraceptive device, Judge Rodney W. Sippel announced Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.

The master settlement agreement lays out $100 million to resolve the claims of plaintiffs nationwide who say that the hormonal ring has caused a heightened risk of blood clots. The cases — as many as 3,800 — had been consolidated into multidistrict litigation in federal court in St. Louis and the New Jersey Superior Court. More than 1,500 of the suits were consolidated onto Sippel’s docket.

In Friday’s settlement conference, Sippel said 95 percent of the plaintiffs are required to opt in to the settlement for it to go forward.

“If 95 percent do not opt in, the settlement fails,” Sippel said.

Roger C. Denton, of Schlichter Bogard & Denton in St. Louis, represents plaintiffs in the case. Friday’s settlement, he said, ends five years of litigation and about a year of settlement discussions. Historically in settlements where plaintiffs have been harmed by medicine or devices, high opt-in rates are easy to reach, he said.

“I don’t expect the agreement to be modified, but it’s a long process,” he said.

All eligible plaintiffs will get notification and will be presented with a one-page opt-in form that binds them to the terms of the settlement. Once they opt in and provide medical documentation of their claims, a claims administrator will determine their award.

It will be “many, many months” before individual plaintiffs receive money, Denton said.

Lainie Keller, a spokeswoman for Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck, said the company isn’t admitting wrongdoing under the settlement and continues to believe NuvaRing is a safe contraceptive.

She said Merck continues to “monitor the safety of the medicine.”

The settlement means Merck, the second-biggest U.S. drugmaker by sales, is paying a fraction of what rivals such as Bayer AG did to resolve lawsuits over their contraceptives. Bayer said last year it has paid more than $1.6 billion to settle claims over its Yasmin and Yaz lines of birth-control pills. Women said Yaz also caused blood clots that led to strokes and heart attacks.

“Merck may be getting out much more cheaply than its competitors because proving the liability case against the NuvaRing device appears to be more difficult,” Carl Tobias, who teaches product-liability law at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said in a phone interview Thursday.

NuvaRing is a hormonal-vaginal contraceptive that combines both estrogen and progestin in a ring to prevent pregnancy. The product, which was linked in a 2011 U.S. Food and Drug Administration report to a higher risk for blood clots, has been sold in the U.S. since 2001.

Bloomberg News contributed to this report.