Over the last four years, with President Joe Biden milking a popular cause as an opponent of Big Pharma drug pricing, the industry has rarely seen good news coming from the White House.
But on Wednesday, Biden took the side of 21 pharmaceutical and medical device companies from the United States and Europe—including AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Roche—in their fight against a lawsuit alleging that they funded terrorism by doing business in Iraq.
Biden has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate a federal appeals court verdict from 2022 which revived a lawsuit seeking damages under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act of 1990.
The unusual complaint was filed in 2017 and dismissed three years later by a U.S. federal judge in Washington, D.C. Two years ago, three judges from a federal appeals court voted unanimously to overturn the decision and renew the case.
The amended complaint seeks damages on behalf of 395 American servicemen and civilians who were killed or wounded in terrorist acts between 2005 and 2011 in Iraq.
Last year, the companies asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and rescind the complaint.
The new opinion from the White House came at the request (PDF) of the Supreme Court, which explained that a separate, unrelated case from last year undermined the Anti-Terrorism claims of the plaintiffs.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that social media company Twitter—now called X—could only be held liable for aiding-and-abetting claims under the ATA if it was shown that it had “consciously and culpably” participated in helping conduct a terrorist act.
Those who brought the Big Pharma complaint allege that the companies—in order to win contracts—paid bribes to a Hezbollah-sponsored militia organization, Jaysh-al-Mahdi, which controlled Iraq’s health ministry. After the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the militia group had infiltrated the new, U.S.-supported Iraqi government.