Pharmacist tied to meningitis outbreak gets eight years in prison

Nate Raymond | Reuters

Former New England Compounding Center supervisory pharmacist Glenn Chin enters the federal court in Boston, Massachusetts, September 19, 2017.

A Massachusetts pharmacist was sentenced on Wednesday to eight years in prison after being convicted on racketeering and fraud charges stemming from his role in a 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 76 people and sickened hundreds more.

Glenn Chin, the former supervisory pharmacist at New England Compounding Center, was convicted by a federal jury in Boston in October but was cleared of second-degree murder charges, which would have exposed him to a maximum prison sentence of life.

Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns to sentence Chin, 49, to 35 years in prison for overseeing the dispensing of substandard drugs made in filthy conditions at the now-defunct Framingham, Massachusetts-based NECC.

Prosecutors said those drugs included mold-tainted steroids produced at NECC that were then injected into patients, harming at least 793 people in 20 different states.

Chin’s lawyers countered by noting that NECC’s co-founder and former president, Barry Cadden, was sentenced in June to nine years in prison when he went before the same judge.

Lawyers for Chin said that he deserved a sentence of just 37 months as he was following Cadden’s directives. Defense lawyers also said Chin had no reason the believe that the steroids were contaminated before they were shipped.

The verdict in Chin’s case came after a separate jury in March found Cadden guilty of racketeering and fraud but similarly cleared him of second-degree murder over the deaths of 25 people.