Vioxx Drug

More than 3,000 former users of Merck & Co.'s withdrawn Vioxx pain drug have signed up to take part in a $4.85-billion settlement deal that a federal judge said Friday was in the best interests of both sides. Lawyers for Merck and plaintiffs who claim to have been harmed by Vioxx were in U.S. District Court to give a status report on the settlement to Judge Eldon Fallon, who had presided over all federal Vioxx trials and is overseeing the settlement process.

Merck & Co. was granted a mistrial Thursday when a Los Angeles jury couldn't reach a verdict after six days of deliberations in a case over the heart attacks of two men who used the company's Vioxx painkiller. California Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney sent the jury of seven women and five men home after they deadlocked. A lawyer for the plaintiffs said the case would probably be retried in April. Merck, which faces 27,000 Vioxx suits, has won eight of 12 cases tried so far.

Jurors in New Jersey found that Merck & Co. failed to provide adequate warnings about health risks tied to its withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx in one case, but they decided that it gave adequate warning in another in two suits tried simultaneously.

Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller helped cause an Idaho mail carrier's heart attack, a New Jersey jury found, ordering the drug maker to pay him and his wife $47.5 million in a retrial of a case the man originally lost. Jurors in Atlantic City imposed actual damages of $20 million and punitive damages of $27.5 million after ruling that Vioxx was partly to blame for Frederick Humeston's 2001 heart attack.

A federal judge ruled that Merck & Co. must defend lawsuits over its Vioxx painkiller, rejecting an argument that U.S. regulations preclude patients from claiming they weren't warned about the drug's risks. U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon in New Orleans denied Merck's request to dismiss two cases on the grounds that the Vioxx warning label was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The increased heart risk from Vioxx, Merck & Co.'s withdrawn arthritis medicine, begins much earlier than after 18 months of use, according to a study contradicting assertions by the drug maker and its scientists. The 2,434-patient study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was halted early when the medicine was pulled from the market in September 2004. Although the median duration of treatment was only 7.

In a major legal victory for Merck & Co. in its massive Vioxx litigation, New Jersey's Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a potential class-action lawsuit that could have cost the drug maker as much as $18 billion. New Jersey's highest court, reversing two lower-court decisions, ruled that a nationwide class-action suit was not appropriate.

New York city and state sued Merck & Co. on Monday, accusing the drug maker of defrauding Medicaid and other government insurance programs by hiding the risks of heart problems associated with its pain medication Vioxx. The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the state's Medicaid and Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Coverage programs had paid more than $100 million for Vioxx prescriptions since the drug went on the market in 1999.

Merck & Co., after setting aside nothing to resolve liability over its Vioxx painkiller, may pay about $5 billion to settle claims that it hid the health risks of its withdrawn drug, three lawyers with direct knowledge of the accord said. Merck, the third-largest U.S. drug maker, pulled Vioxx off the market in 2004 after a study showed it raised the risk of heart attacks in some patients.

Merck & Co.'s decision to pay $4.85 billion to settle tens of thousands of claims from patients who took the popular painkiller Vioxx may stiffen the resolve of other companies facing litigation over pharmaceutical products or other consumer goods. The settlement, announced Friday, may also vindicate the drug maker's initial strategy of aggressively fighting virtually every injury claim, legal experts said.