‘THAT’S WHEN THE BUGS CAME OUT’
The former quality control officer for a Massachusetts company behind a deadly meningitis outbreak testified yesterday at her ex-boss’s murder trial, describing a literal sweatshop that had labs infested with mold and insects in temperatures that topped 100 degrees.
“(Expletive) the SOPs,” Annette Robinson testified New England Compounding Co.’s supervising pharmacist Glenn Chin told her after her repeated attempts to get CEO Barry J. Cadden to update their standard operating procedures were ignored.
During the 2012 outbreak, 64 people died and hundreds of others were sickened from fungus-tainted steroid injections the Framingham company shipped throughout the country.
Testifying yesterday in Cadden’s medical murder trial, Robinson, 53, of Hopkinton, said she had previously worked testing racehorses for doping and had no prior experience in environmental monitoring, let alone drug compounding.
But that didn’t stop the Wrentham millionaire from promoting her to the safety watchdog position. In seven years on the job, Robinson said, she never received any training.
Robinson testified that Cadden turned a blind eye to conditions in the so-called clean room, where the deadly methylprednisolone acetate was mixed in 2012, including brutal heat when the air conditioning was on the fritz.
“The temperature got up over 100 degrees, but they were still working,” Robinson said of the lab technicians.
“Barry went out and bought them T-shirts, underwear and socks to change into because they were soaked. ... When the warm weather came, that’s when the bugs came out.”
And then there was the issue Chin mentioned in an email shown jurors, in which he likened the lab workers who compounded the drugs to “the hairy zoo animals.”
“The guys were pretty hairy,” Robinson testified, “and the hair was falling out all over the place.”
NECC’s solution, she said, was to increase its vacuuming.
For nine months before the outbreak exploded into a national health crisis, Robinson testified, she alerted Cadden and others weekly to fuzzy mold and bacteria her testing was turning up on surfaces and in the air at NECC, even marking the danger signs in red “so it would hit them in face.”
But no action was ever taken, she said, and the production of drugs never stopped.
Robinson returns to the witness stand in U.S. District Court this morning to face cross-examination by Cadden’s defense team.