After being postponed for several months, a Daubert hearing in the Zoloft MDL kicked off again with counsel for Pfizer claiming the plaintiffs’ causation expert was unqualified to offer opinions in the case and used improper methodology to arrive at his conclusions that Zoloft causes cardiac birth defects.
In addition to claiming expert Nicholas Jewell’s conclusions were not peer-reviewed and based on bad science, one of Zoloft’s lawyers, Mark Cheffo, told the court that in the time since the MDL’s last Daubert hearing—which allows parties in a case to challenge expert testimony before the start of trial and is named for the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals—new studies have surfaced, including some from the American Heart Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, indicating that “a causal relationship between Zoloft and birth defects does not exist.”
