Many mothers who took this drug for depression while they were pregnant found out too late that it can cause serious, even life-threatening birth defects.
This is yet another case in which a big pharmaceutical company should have warned the public about the side effects of a drug it was selling, but didn’t. Instead, GlaxoSmithKline hid evidence that Paxil could cause birth defects. In a secret 1997 memo, five years after Paxil went on the market, a Glaxo executive wrote about about the need to “bury” evidence linking Paxil to birth defects.
Contents of the memo were revealed in a 2009 trial by lawyers for parents whose son was born with three serious heart defects. Glaxo lost the case and had to pay the family $2.5 million in compensatory damages. According to Bloomberg News, evidence at the trial showed that Glaxo “purchased….Paxil from a Danish company that had done animal studies showing that young rats died after taking low doses of the drug.”