Джонатан Дэвис, добивающийся в судебном порядке признания ответственности компании Merck за смерть пациента с синдромом постакнетарного финастерида (PFS), привлекает внимание к этой проблеме на международной конференции юристов и медицинских специалистов.
29 августа 2026 г.
Истец перехватывает контроль над новостями PFS.
Takin’ It to the Suits
On August 5, attorney Jonathan Davies presented research at the 30th Annual World Congress for Medical Law examining the gap between emerging scientific evidence of PFS and delayed regulatory intervention despite mounting evidence of the condition’s prevalence.
Titled How Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Influence Public Health Law: The Case of Finasteride and PFS, Davies’ review summarizes how Propecia producer Merck & Co.—complicit with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—managed to obscure evidence of causal links between finasteride and persistent physical, sexual, and neuropsychiatric reactions.
Since its 1967 inception, the World Congress for Medical Law has grown into one of the leading international forums for medical law and legal medicine, attracting not only attorneys, but physicians, and bioethicists. This year’s event, held at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, drew more than 450 participants from 57 nations.
In a slide headed “The Long Silence,” Davies, who serves as President of the Israeli Society for Medicine and Law, and whose eponymous firm has been litigating personal-injury and medical-malpractice cases since 1990, delineates the tactics that allowed finasteride to be prescribed with severely deficient warnings for two decades:
• Regulatory shield: Approval was treated as proof of safety, converting a licensing decision into a defense against causation.
• Evidentiary gap as weapon: The absence of definitive randomized trials was cited as evidence of no effect—not as a gap the manufacturer left unfilled.
• Signals discounted: Spontaneous reports of persistent harm were dismissed as anecdotal, psychosomatic, or coincidental.
In another slide, “The Core Failure,” he writes:
“A straightforward database analysis could have tested the safety signal at any point. Two questions define the case: (1) Why were simple, inexpensive pharmacovigilance database studies never performed by Merck—or, if performed, never published? (2) Why did the FDA not require such studies from the manufacturer, or conduct them independently?”
Patient, Engage Thy Counsel
In the abstract to his research, Davies explains his professional connection to PFS.
“I have filed a personal injury claim and a class action versus several pharmaceutical companies that for two decades failed to conduct proper epidemiological trials despite a mass of adverse reports,” he says. “The claim examines how the deliberate concealment of finasteride’s risks constitutes a preventable public health crisis, akin to the opioid epidemic.”
“In the case of both Propecia and OxyContin, it was aggregated litigation—and not the ordinary regulatory process—that, through discovery and disclosure, finally moved the record into the open,” he adds.
Davies’s class action suit was filed on behalf of hundreds of Israeli finasteride patients who have continued to suffer from a wide range of adverse reactions long after quitting the drug. The action’s legal arguments, Davies tells us, highlight severe medical negligence, including physicians ignoring major contraindications like a family history of suicide, while failing to obtain informed consent.
Moreover, he notes, it accuses the pharmaceutical industry of “effectively conducting an unsupervised experiment on the public” through calculated suppression of safety data and reliance on “soft” labeling, which in turn delayed crucial clinical warnings by more than a decade.
The court recently approved Davies’s petition to update his case with a timeline of pertinent regulatory actions (above left), namely those that have mandated warnings to the finasteride product label and tightened controls on prescribing the drug.
“When governmental bodies fail to proactively protect the public, personal injury and class-action lawsuits can force corporate transparency, pave the way for strict informed-consent protocols, and reshape overarching public health law to prioritize patient safety over industry profit,” Davies told attendees during his session at the WCML Congress.
Finasteride was originally developed by Merck & Co., Inc., and first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1993 as Proscar (5 mg, for enlarged prostate), and again in 1997, as Propecia (1 mg, for hair loss).
In June 2021, Merck spun off its Organon subsidiary as an independent public company (NYSE: OGN). Founded in the Netherlands in 1923, Organon bills itself as a “global health care company dedicated to making a world of difference for women, their families and the communities they care for.” In April 2026, Mumbai, India-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries agreed to acquire Organon in a deal worth $11.75 billion US.
Among the Merck products Organon acquired in the deal were Proscar and Propecia. To report adverse events for either finasteride product, call the Organon Service Center at (844)674-3200, or email Service_Center@Organon.com.
Anyone living in the US who suffers from PFS should also report his or her symptoms to the US FDA. Anyone living outside the US who suffers from PFS should report his or her symptoms to the US FDA as well as to his or her local DRA, as directed on our Report Your Side Effects page.
If you or a loved one are suffering from PFS, and feeling depressed or unstable, please don’t hesitate to contact the PFS Foundation as soon as possible via our Patient Support hotline: social@pfsfoundation.org
Thank you.