Grabar Law Office has filed a putative class action against Merck Sharp & Dohme Corporation (“defendant” or “Merck”) on behalf of all persons or entities in the United States and its territories that purchased RotaTeq directly from Merck from April 25, 2014 through the present. This action challenges Merck’s anticompetitive vaccine bundling scheme whereby Merck leverages its monopoly power in multiple pediatric vaccine markets to maintain its monopoly power in the Rotavirus Vaccine Market, enabling it to charge supra competitive prices to purchasers of its rotavirus vaccines.
Specifically, as alleged, Merck had contracts that offered “bundled” discounts that would condition pricing on loyalty to a bundle of Merck vaccines. In preparation for a competitor’s introduction of a competing rotavirus vaccine, Merck added a condition to its contracts that required customers to buy all or nearly all of their pediatric rotavirus vaccines from Merck or face substantial penalties on all other Merck vaccines (the “RotaTeq Bundled Loyalty Condition”). This new bundle (the “Merck Bundle”) meant that any customer who wanted to buy the competitor’s vaccine had to be willing to accept substantial penalties on any RotaTeq the customer bought and substantial penalties on all other Merck vaccines as well. As alleged in the Complaint, the Merck Bundle substantially foreclosed the Rotavirus Vaccine Market to would-be lower cost competition. As a result, plaintiff and the proposed class were overcharged having paid artificially inflated prices for rotavirus vaccines.
The case is Margiotti & Kroll, P.C. v. Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., 18-CV-3064 (E.D.Pa.).
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