The McKesson Corporation is a pharmaceutical distributor that, according to its website, distributes one-third of the medicines Americans use every day, supplying more than 40,000 pharmacy locations. One of the devices it distributes is the NuvaRing contraceptive device. Manufacturer Merck & Co. is now defending nearly 1,000 NuvaRing lawsuits in multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the Eastern District of Missouri. For the first time, however, California plaintiffs added McKesson to the list of defendants in a recent NuvaRing lawsuit. Merck moved to have McKesson dismissed, claiming they were fraudulently joined to avoid federal jurisdiction. A California district court judge disagreed, and now McKesson will remain as a defendant in the case and the case will remain in California state court rather than being transferred to the MDL court—the first of its kind in NuvaRing litigation.
