Another Yaz lawsuit has been filed against Bayer, the manufacturers of Yaz and its sister pill, Yasmin. The plaintiffs, Rosanne Spillson Schoenberger and Thomas T. Schoenberger, filed a deep vein thrombosis lawsuit that will join the MDL currently underway in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois with judge David R Herndon presiding.
The Schoenbergers have chosen to have their individual trial be presented to a jury, but their decision to join the MDL was meant to help speed up the process of discovery. These pretrial proceedings help individual plaintiffs not have to congest the court system by duplicating the presentation of evidence. With thousands of Yaz lawsuits currently underway, it is expected that numerous settlement agreements will be made by Bayer in an effort to quickly dissolve the lawsuits and possibly lower the overall payout amounts on a per-plaintiff basis.
So far, Bayer has settled thousands of Yaz lawsuits; the payouts have already topped the billion-dollar mark. And more settlements are being encouraged as the company seems to be ceding to the claims that it failed to properly inform the medical community and the public of the dangers linked to Yaz use. The company has also been accused of downplaying the dangers linked to Yaz use in its earlier advertisements, which have since been changed to include the dangers. Yaz has been found to cause serious side effects including heart attacks, strokes, gallbladder disease and kidney stones. The pills also cause blood clot-related conditions like pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis.
In the Schoenberger lawsuit, the plaintiff claims that she was not aware that Yasmin was significantly different from other birth control pills out at the time. The main different with Yaz is that the pills are made with drospirenone (a synthetic progestin).
