Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
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Question: The decision by Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman in Norman, Oklahoma, came in the first case to go to trial out of 2,700 nationally by states, counties and cities seeking to hold drug companies responsible for the deadly epidemic. Balkman reduced the amount he had awarded in August by $107 million after agreeing with New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J that he had made a math error. J&J said it will appeal, and that the award and finding of liability were “neither supported by the facts nor the law.”  A spokesman for Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said that office is reviewing the decision and will formally respond within the next few days. Opioids were involved in almost 400,000 overdose deaths from 1999 to 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Following a non-jury trial, Balkman ruled in August that Oklahoma had proven that J&J engaged in misleading marketing about the benefits of painkillers, and that their addictive risks caused a public nuisance in the form of the opioid crisis. Hunter had sought to have J&J pay $17 billion to help fund addiction treatment and other services to repair damage from the opioid epidemic over the next 30 years. Balkman, however, awarded only enough money for one year of programs, saying Oklahoma failed to support its claims regarding the need to abate the epidemic in future years. Following the August ruling, Oklahoma asked Balkman for permission to return to his courtroom annually to prove those costs, but Balkman on Friday maintained his prior ruling. J&J, meanwhile, argued that it deserved a $355 million credit, reflecting pre-trial settlements by the drugmakers Purdue Pharma LP and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.  Balkman concluded on Friday that state law did not allow such credits. Last month, J&J and four other companies proposed a $48 billion settlement framework to resolve all of the opioid cases they face, with J&J paying $4 billion. Lawyers for the local governments have opposed the proposal. If approved, the settlement would let J&J resolve some of the thousands of product liability lawsuits it faces. The company also faces litigation over whether its baby powder causes cancer, a claim it denies.

Answer: Oklahoma judge reduces Johnson & Johnson opioid payout to $465 million.


Question: Chaiya, under pressure from health activists and doctors who campaigned to have him sacked, said declaring compulsory licenses on the drugs would save Thailand more than 3 billion baht ($100 million) over the next five years. “The findings have convinced me to go ahead with the CLs since the ministry’s policy is to give patients good access to quality drugs at cheap prices,” Chaiya said of the review by a panel of Health Ministry officials. The decision is a blow to major pharmaceutical companies which had lobbied hard to reverse the CL policy launched by the previous government appointed after a bloodless 2006 coup. The three drugs are Letrozole, a breast cancer medicine made by Novartis AG, the breast and lung cancer drug Docetaxel by Sanofi-Aventis, and Roche’s Erlotinib, used for treating lung, pancreatic and ovarian cancer. A license issued on a leukemia drug, Glivec, was cancelled last month after its maker, Novartis, agreed to supply it free to hundreds of Thai patients. Shortly after a democratically-elected government took power in February, Chaiya ordered the review of a policy he said was a “politically correct decision, but not legally correct”. At the time he said the government could afford the full cost of the drugs, if it meant avoiding trade retaliation by the United States, home to some of the world’s biggest drug firms. U.S. officials denied there were any plans to impose sanctions on Bangkok, although Thailand was placed on a watch list, meaning Washington believed its respect for patents had weakened. When Chaiya, a businessman with no medical training, fired the Health Ministry’s top official negotiating cheaper prices from foreign drug firms, outraged health activists and doctors launched a campaign to remove him. Chaiya said on Monday the ministry would buy cheaper versions of the cancer drugs from generic producers, such as Indian firms which already supply copy-cat HIV-AIDS medicines to Thailand. Under World Trade Organisation rules, countries can issue a compulsory license to make or buy generic versions of patented drugs deemed critical to public health as long as the medicines are meant for domestic use. Former Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla overrode Merck’s AIDS drug Efavirenz in late 2006, arguing that Thailand could not afford patented drugs for a national health plan that covers about 80 percent of the country’s 63 million people. A few months later he did the same on a Sanofi-Aventis heart medicine and an AIDS drug made by Abbott Laboratories, which refused to register several new medicines in Thailand. Mongkol, who targeted the four cancer drugs weeks before he left office, has defended the CL policy against major drug firms which accused him of stealing their intellectual property rights. ($1= 30 Baht)

Answer: Thailand will override cancer drug patents.


Question: "Explaining why he couldn’t support the Texas Senate’s version of the 2012-13 state budget, Sen. John Whitmire said he didn’t know how state agencies can cope with further budget cuts, singling out the Texas Board of Nursing as an example. ""I asked them for their backlog of investigations,"" he said. ""They’ve got 3,000 complaints against nurses, many of them sexual assaults, malfeasance."" Time to crank up the Truth-O-Meter, starting with the board’s unresolved complaints. Some background: The board investigates and adjudicates complaints about Texas nurses who could be violating the Nursing Practice Act, which imposes regulations on nursing education, licensing and practices in the state including rules against unnecessarily exposing patients to the risk of harm or failing to adequately care for them. At the nursing board, spokesman Bruce Holter told us the senator’s count of 3,000 backlogged complaints is too low, accounting solely for unresolved cases from fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In 2010, the board resolved 14,429 of 16,890 complaints filed against nurses, leaving 2,461 unresolved cases. As of this March, another 511 complaints filed in 2009 remained unresolved, bringing the total backlog to nearly 3,000. There also are several hundred lingering complaints dating back to May 2006, board officials said. As of March, the board had about 11,000 open investigations, including the backlog. What are the complaints about? ""In general,"" Holter said, ""criminal conduct, drug-related conduct and failure to follow the minimum standard of care are the main types of complaints."" That covers malfeasance. But what about Whitmire’s other charge — that a chunk of the backlogged cases are sexual assault complaints? Lara Wendler, Whitmire’s chief of staff, told us the senator based his statement on conversations with administrators at agencies, including the nursing board. She added, though, that Whitmire was referring to all regulatory agencies, not just the nursing board, when he said backlogged cases included ""many"" sexual assaults. That was not clear from Whitmire’s floor remarks. Holter said the board checks all nurses licensed in Texas against state and national databases identifying sex offenders. Currently, the board is investigating complaints against four nurses who appear on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s sex offender database, and 12 nurses who appear on a national sex offender registry kept by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. ""Sexual assault complaints against nurses make up a small percentage of the overall number of complaints investigated by the board,"" Holter said. But he added that other than the nurses found on the sexual offender databases, ""it would be difficult for staff to ‘pin down’ the number of complaints involving sexual assault."" Why? The board doesn’t categorize complaints by type, though when disciplinary action has been taken, Holter said, the board can run a data mining program to identify specific rule violations. But because the board doesn't track the number of sexual assault cases, it would have to review each resolved complaint individually. Lastly, why have complaints stacked up? Board employees are barred from discussing the details of individual complaints, but the board’s general counsel Dusty Johnston told us that generally, complaints don’t get resolved for a variety of reasons. He offered several examples: The investigator may be under-performing; extensive due process is required; the medical records of the patient involved in the complaint are difficult to obtain. So, the board says it has about 3,000 backlogged complaints, as Whitmire said. According to the board, many of the complaints allege malfeasance by nurses, as Whitmire also said, and a smaller number involve sexual assaults. But no one can determine the precise breakout without access to confidential board information."

Answer:
"John Whitmire Says the Texas Board of Nursing has a backlog of ""3,000 complaints against nurses, many of them sexual assaults, malfeasance."