Under the learned intermediary rule, for a warning claim to succeed, at a bare minimum the prescribing (or sometimes another) doctor at least has to read the allegedly defective warning. After all, there’s a causation element to every warning claim – the defect (whatever’s allegedly wrong with the warning) has to cause the injury. If the prescribing physician never even read the purportedly inadequate warning, none of those inadequacies could have affected his/her treatment of the patient. This common-sense notion, that a warning that’s not read cannot be causal, has been bedrock law in prescription medical product liability litigation for decades:

Alabama

In re Trasylol Products Liability Litigation, 2011 WL 2117257, at *5 (S.D.Fla. May 23, 2011) (applying Alabama law) (“no record evidence indicating that [the prescriber] read the warning that Plaintiff claims was inadequate”); Emody v. Medtronic, Inc., 238 F. Supp.2d 1291, 1293, 1296 (N.D. Ala. 2003) (prescriber “did not even read the package insert”; thus he “he did not rely on [defendant’s] warnings”).