A federal jury in Portland on Tuesday awarded $2.4 millionin damages to a woman who said she was fired from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals for complaining about alleged misleading marketing tactics.
Suzanne Ivie had worked at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals for 19 years, most recently in Salt Lake City as an executive district sales manager within its respiratory products division. Her district covered eastern Oregon, Idaho and Utah. She was fired on June 6, 2019, from her job, where she made $223,000 a year.
AstraZeneca is a global, biopharmaceutical business headquartered in Cambridge, England, and is one of the manufacturers of a coronavirus vaccine.
The jury awarded damages after finding the company violated the Oregon whistleblower protection law, finding Ivie was fired after she made a “good faith report” of alleged company misconduct.
It ordered $1,872,000 in noneconomic damages for emotional distress and harm to reputation and $510,423 for lost wages after a weeklong trial before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo in the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse.
“Suzanne alerted AstraZeneca to bad behavior and, instead of fixing the problem, the company punished her,” said Anita Mazumdar Chambers, one of her lawyers. “Today, a jury of regular people told AstraZeneca that’s not acceptable in our society.”
The jury did not find the company had discriminated against Ivie based on her age, as she had alleged. She was one of the older staff members at 51. Nor did it find AstraZeneca liable under the False Claims Act after Ivie had alleged her supervisor encouraged the use of prescription drugs for unapproved, or off-label, purposes.
Ivie said she complained in December 2018 that a supervisor appeared to be promoting “off-label marketing” for two prescription medicines to treat pulmonary disease, Bevespi and Daliresp.
She said she faced retaliation in response. She was removed from leadership jobs, wrongly accused of not completing a certain number of hours of coaching her sales representatives, pressured to work weekends and had her bonus reduced, she said.
The use of pharmaceuticals for unapproved symptoms or conditions, in unapproved patient groups or in unapproved dosages is referred to as “off-label” use. Promoting off-label use that isn’t medically accepted can have a negative impact on quality of care, her lawyers said during the civil trial.
Ivie testified that her supervisor pushed the sales teams to promote AstraZeneca medications to doctors for uses beyond those sanctioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ivie had consistently received positive performance reviews until she complained, her lawyers argued.
Attorney Robert Scott Oswald urged the jury to serve as the “conscience of the community … to protect Ivie, to protect AstraZeneca’s current employees, to protect AstraZeneca’s future employees and to protect all of us.”
“AstraZeneca takes no responsibility for its actions and without responsibility, there is no accountability,” Oswald told jurors in closing arguments.
AstraZeneca’s lawyer Melinda S. Riechert countered that Ivie was fired because she wasn’t doing the work expected of her as a district sales manager.
She said the company’s compliance unit found that Ivie’s allegations regarding off-label drug marketing of the two drugs were “unsubstantiated.”
“Ms. Ivie was fired for not meeting the expectations of the job,” Riechert said.
Ivie also accused her immediate supervisor of making inappropriate comments about her age and favoring younger employees.
She said the supervisor nicknamed her “Benatar” after singer-songwriter Pat Benatar because she was older than most of her co-workers. The supervisor also told Ivie that she was “aging really well” and that she thought Ivie would have more wrinkles, according to court testimony.
Ivie said that the company’s claim that she didn’t follow its coaching policy was pretext for firing her, noting that the company’s policy handbook has no coaching requirement.
AstraZeneca’s lawyers said the in-person coaching requirement was shared via email with district sales managers and didn’t need to be in the company handbook.
The company’s lawyers also argued the age discrimination complaint was unfounded, saying Ivie’s supervisor at the time was just four years younger at 47 and that other staff on her sales team were 50, 49, 45, 40 and 39.
The same day Ivie learned from her supervisor that she would receive a negative performance review for 2018, she raised an anonymous complaint alleging that she was subjected to “retaliation, bullying, and unethical behavior” by that supervisor, the company’s lawyers told jurors.
“AstraZeneca thoroughly investigated these concerns, and a series of other complaints Ivie raised in the subsequent months — all of which were found unsubstantiated,” the company’s lawyers wrote in court documents. When Ivie failed to correct her performance in 2018 and 2019, she was fired, they said.
After the jury was dismissed, Reichert, AstraZeneca’s lawyer, raised to the judge the company’s previously unsuccessful argument that Oregon whistleblower law shouldn’t apply to Ivie, who is not an Oregon resident. Ivie’s lawyers countered that Ivie performed some work in Oregon, entitling her to relief under the law.
