Merck Loses Federal Vioxx Case
A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
August 17, 2006 10:31 a.m.
A jury found Merck & Co. negligent in the second federal lawsuit over Vioxx, where a 62-year-old man said the painkiller was responsible for his heart attack.
The verdict, in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, narrows Merck's slight edge on the Vioxx trial scorecard, with the drug maker winning five trials and losing four. The case was one of more than 14,000 lawsuits against Merck over Vioxx.
In this case, Gerald Barnett, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, alleged that the Vioxx he took for 33 months contributed to his September 2002 heart attack.
Mr. Barnett exercised "religiously," stuck to a healthy diet and brought down his cholesterol with drugs, while Merck hid the risk that Vioxx might cause heart attacks, Mr. Barnett's lawyer said.
Mr. Barnett needed a five-way bypass operation. According to court papers, his doctor said that if Merck had disclosed the drug's risks earlier, he would never have prescribed it for Mr. Barnett. As it was, Mr. Barnett, who had retired from the FBI to Myrtle Beach, S.C., kept taking the drug even after the heart attack, and until a few weeks before it was pulled from the market in September 2004.
DESKTOP NEWS ALERTS
This story broke first with a Desktop News Alert. Get breaking news as it happens, delivered straight to your desktop. Alerts will appear in a small window on your screen, much like an instant-messaging window. Sign up now.Merck alerted the FDA in June 2000, about seven months after Mr. Barnett started taking Vioxx, that a study showed heart attacks occurred five times as often in patients taking Vioxx as those on another drug, called naproxen. Merck said the difference was caused by protection from naproxen, rather than damage from Vioxx. The drug's label didn't note the different heart attack rates until April 2002. The company pulled the drug from the market after another study showed that it could double the risk of heart attacks.
The New England Journal of Medicine, which published the Approve study on Vioxx in February 2005, recently issued a correction over the 18-month threshold, contradicting the company's position that the drug doesn't increase risk of heart attacks and strokes to people who took it for less than 18 months.
Christopher Seeger, a central figure among the plaintiffs' attorneys, says the Barnett case is the first time the lawyers had been able to bring one of their top choices to trial.
Merck is nearing two major Vioxx milestones: First comes the one-year anniversary of the first Vioxx verdict; then comes the expiration in most states of the two-year statute of limitations for people to file suits claiming the painkiller caused their heart attack or stroke.
A year after getting hit with a $253.4 million judgment by a Texas state-court jury, Merck holds a narrow lead in the trial tally. Plaintiffs, some of whom have recovered fully from the medical setbacks they blame on Vioxx, have found it tougher than they expected to win jurors' sympathy. Merck's stock is up by a third in the past year, and is now higher than it was when the company yanked Vioxx off the market just over two years ago.
But plaintiffs' lawyers maintain that even if they win just two or three of every 10 cases, the damage awards and litigation costs would be high enough to pressure the Whitehouse Station, N.J., company to consider settling the remaining cases.
The pace and intensity of trials is set to accelerate, with as many as eight due to start before year's end. Once the statute of limitations passes, Merck and the plaintiffs' attorneys will get a more accurate picture of the number of cases and their relative merits, which could help lay the groundwork for settlement discussions. The two sides have battled over which cases to try first, because each is attempting to establish a pattern that will strengthen their position in settlement talks that are sure to come. |
