Three ma­jor drug dis­trib­u­tors are off the hook for what may have been a $2.5 bil­lion pay­ment af­ter a fed­er­al judge found them not li­able for the opi­oid epi­dem­ic in parts of West Vir­ginia, one of the hard­est-hit ar­eas of the coun­try.

De­spite dis­trib­ut­ing more than 51.3 mil­lion dos­es of oxy­codone and hy­drocodone to phar­ma­cies in Ca­bell Coun­ty and the city of Hunt­ing­ton over less than a decade, McKesson, Amerisource­Ber­gen and Car­di­nal Health didn’t cause an over­sup­ply of opi­oids in the area, Judge David Faber ruled on Mon­day.

“Doc­tors, 99% of whom were act­ing in good faith, de­ter­mined the to­tal vol­ume of pre­scrip­tion opi­oids that phar­ma­cies or­dered from de­fen­dants and dis­pensed pur­suant to those pre­scrip­tions,” Faber wrote in his opin­ion.

The rul­ing fol­lows a months-long tri­al, in which pros­e­cu­tors ar­gued that the de­fen­dants cre­at­ed an opi­oid epi­dem­ic in Ca­bell Coun­ty and Hunt­ing­ton through their whole­sale dis­tri­b­u­tion of pre­scrip­tion opi­oids. The coun­ty and city were hit hard by the epi­dem­ic, with opi­oids ac­count­ing for more than 80% of over­dose deaths in Ca­bell Coun­ty from 2001 to 2018.

In 2017, more than 10% of peo­ple in Hunt­ing­ton, Ca­bell Coun­ty and Wayne Coun­ty were ad­dict­ed to opi­oids or had been in the past, ac­cord­ing to court doc­u­ments.

The state of West Vir­ginia tracked more than 6,000 over­dose deaths from 2001 to 2015, the doc­u­ments state. For­mer Bu­reau for Pub­lic Health com­mis­sion­er Rahul Gup­ta once called the state “ground ze­ro” for the na­tion­al opi­oid epi­dem­ic.

“The opi­oid cri­sis has tak­en a con­sid­er­able toll on the cit­i­zens of Ca­bell Coun­ty and the City of Hunt­ing­ton,” Faber wrote on Mon­day. “And while there is a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy to as­sign blame in such cas­es, they must be de­cid­ed not based on sym­pa­thy, but on the facts and the Law.”

Faber added that “there is noth­ing un­rea­son­able about dis­trib­ut­ing con­trolled sub­stances to ful­fill legal­ly writ­ten pre­scrip­tions.”

Mean­while, Hunt­ing­ton May­or Steve Williams said in an emailed state­ment that his “dis­ap­point­ment can­not be mea­sured.”

In their com­plaint, pros­e­cu­tors ac­cused the dis­trib­u­tors of sell­ing enough opi­oids in West Vir­ginia be­tween 2006 and 2014 to ac­count for “611 pain pills for every man, woman and child in the state.”

Plain­tiffs ac­cused the dis­trib­u­tors — as well as man­u­fac­tur­ers, phar­ma­cies and phar­ma­cy ben­e­fit man­agers — of en­gi­neer­ing “a dra­mat­ic shift in how and when opi­oids are pre­scribed” and fail­ing to main­tain ef­fec­tive con­trols.

“This case was al­ways about hold­ing these dis­trib­u­tors ac­count­able and pro­vid­ing our doc­tors, nurs­es, coun­selors, first re­spon­ders and so­cial work­ers with some of the re­sources need­ed to com­bat the opi­oid cri­sis,” Williams said in the state­ment. “We will work along­side our coun­sel to en­sure the fight con­tin­ues on be­half of so many who lost their lives and liveli­hoods to the opi­oid epi­dem­ic.”

The city and coun­ty sought $2.5 bil­lion from McKesson, Amerisource­Ber­gen and Car­di­nal Health to ad­dress the cri­sis, ac­cord­ing to a Reuters re­port. The state of West Vir­ginia opt­ed out of a $26 bil­lion set­tle­ment with the dis­trib­u­tors last year.

The state has since reached set­tle­ments with a suite of com­pa­nies for their role in the opi­oid epi­dem­ic, in­clud­ing J&J, which agreed to pay $99 mil­lion ear­li­er this year to clear up claims against it. Te­va and Al­ler­gan al­so struck a set­tle­ment with West Vir­ginia back in April, worth $161.5 mil­lion.

The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is taking place this week, and so far, some of the Big Pharmas are turning out new trial data about some of the biggest drugs in the space.

First off, Novartis announced that its drug, Kisqali, showed about a year of progression-free survival in patients with different types of first-line metastatic breast cancer. The CDK 4/6 drug was first approved by the FDA in 2017, setting it up in direct competition against Pfizer’s Ibrance.

Singapore has long established itself as a major hub for pharma manufacturing, and now several big players are looking to further cement their presence in the Lion City.

Takeda, Sanofi and GSK are forming a partnership with the Singapore-based Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and several local academic institutions, including the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, its enterprise company called NTUitive and Singapore Institute of Technology to provide a greater boost to the manufacturing of biologics.

GSK can breathe a little easier after a Florida federal judge dismissed thousands of claims that Zantac and related heartburn products caused cancer, triggering a boost in premarket trading on Wednesday.

Plaintiffs in the sprawling multidistrict litigation (MDL) at first attempted to link popular ranitidine heartburn products to 10 types of cancer, but later withdrew breast, kidney, colorectal, prostate and lung. On Tuesday, Judge Robin Rosenberg tossed the remaining claims in liver, bladder, pancreatic, esophageal, and stomach cancers, upon determining that the allegations were based on “flawed” and “unreliable” evidence.