She Died After Her Pacemaker Battery Failed. Its Maker Knew of Problems for Years.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/business/pacemakers-batteries-recall-boston-scientific.html

https://archive.ph/rr0ub

She Died After Her Pacemaker Battery Failed. Its Maker Knew of Problems for Years.
Boston Scientific announced multiple recalls but has said its battery issues were limited. One internal test in 2025 found batteries with an “extremely high failure rate.”
By Katie Thomas
March 19, 2026

Gladys Knepper, at 93, had a morning routine that never wavered. She woke up at 6 and made her bed. She got a pot of coffee going and went outside to pick up her copy of The Dubuque Telegraph Herald.

So when a neighbor in Dyersville, Iowa, noticed that Ms. Knepper’s newspaper was still on her doorstep on Mother’s Day in 2024, she knew something was wrong. Inside, she found Ms. Knepper sprawled on the floor.

It was the first in a series of blackouts that doctors initially attributed to the inevitable deterioration of an older woman. Ten days after her fall, they discovered the real problem: her pacemaker. She underwent surgery to get a new one but by then, her heart was severely damaged. She died three weeks later.

Boston Scientific, the company that made the device, would later conclude that the battery inside it had failed. Two years earlier, a person in Finland had died as a result of the same malfunction. And for years, factory tests had revealed pacemaker batteries that were failing unexpectedly, according to internal company records and government inspection documents obtained by The New York Times.

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