NEW ORLEANS: A federal jury ruled Thursday that pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. had failed to warn doctors about the risks involved in prescribing its now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx and directed the company to pay $51 million in damages to a retired FBI agent, who suffered a heart attack while on the drug.
There was another setback for the company when a New Jersey judge set aside an earlier verdict with regard to the drug, which had favored the drug maker, and ordered a new trial.
Merck had taken Vioxx off the shelves since September 2005 after clinical trials established the pain and arthritis drug's use can lead to heart attacks and strokes in some patients. The drug had $2.5 billion in annual sales before it was recalled.
The company is facing some 14,200 lawsuits from nearly 27,000 affected people in various federal and state courts and it is fighting the cases on individual basis. Out of nine jury verdicts in these cases so far, including the one today, the company had won five.
In the New Orleans verdict, the jury found that the drug maker had knowingly misrepresented or failed to disclose a material fact to the physicians of Gerald Barnett, 62, a retired FBI agent, who suffered a heart attack after taking Vioxx for 31 months. The jury also found that doctors and the plaintiff were not at fault and awarded $50 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.
In New Jersey, judge Carol Higbee threw out a state jury verdict, which favored the company in a suit filed by a 60-year-old postal worker, Frederick Humeston, who claimed Vioxx caused his heart attack. The jury in this case said it found that the company had provided adequate warning to doctors about health risks from Vioxx and that it did not commit any consumer fraud by marketing the drug.
The judge said there is new evidence and ordered a new trial, which is now expected to take place in January along with other trials on the judge's calendar. The judge based the ruling on an article appearing in New England Journal of Medicine in December 2005 about how Merck evaluated the safety of Vioxx. The medical publication had claimed the company had inappropriately deleted data on three heart attacks among patients on Vioxx in a trial, the results of which were published by the journal in 2000 just a few months before the drug was launched.
There are three more federal Vioxx cases that are expected to go on trial in 2006 after which the New Orleans federal judge overseeing the federal Vioxx caseload will decide how future cases should be handled.
Merck said it will appeal against the jury verdict, saying the company had acted appropriately.
Merck shares fell $2.35 to $38.83 on the New York Stock Exchange.
