NJ jury awards plaintiff $20 mln in Vioxx case
Last Updated: 2007-03-12 13:29:15 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New Jersey jury found on Monday that Merck & Co. Inc.'s withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx was responsible for a plaintiff's heart attack and it awarded $20 million in compensatory damages.
In the second phase of a two-part trial, the jury in Atlantic City, New Jersey, also found that Frederick Humeston's doctor would not have prescribed Vioxx to his patient had he been aware of the heart risks associated with the drug.
The jury awarded $18 million to Humeston and $2 million to the Idaho postal worker's wife.
Discussions were underway to determine whether the trial would continue with the jury possibly deciding punitive damages that could be assessed against the drugmaker, a Merck spokeswoman said.
The jury had previously found that Merck failed to provide adequate warnings about health risks tied to the drug that was pulled from the market in September 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in patients taking it for at least 18 months.
The jury also in the first phase found that Merck committed consumer fraud by making misrepresentations concerning the drug's heart risks, and that it intentionally suppressed or concealed material information from physicians prior to the plaintiff's heart attack.
HUMESTON CASE WAS RETRIAL
The Humeston case was a retrial of a suit that the drugmaker had won only to have New Jersey Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee throw out the verdict after ruling that new evidence had come to light that Merck had excluded from the original trial.
What had been a victory now goes into the loss column for the drugmaker that is facing more than 27,000 lawsuits from people who claim to have been harmed by the once $2.5 billion-a-year drug.
"We certainly hoped for a different result," said Hope Freiwald, a member of Merck's defense team.
"The last time a jury had a chance to look at all the evidence at one time, it found that Merck acted appropriately," she added, referring to the jury in the first Humeston trial.
In that trial, the jury was asked to determine whether Merck provided adequate heart risk warnings and whether Vioxx was a primary cause of Humeston's heart attack at the same time. That jury decided that Humeston had other health problems that caused his 2001 heart attack.
Higbee decided this time to break up the trial into two distinct phases, leaving the critical determination of whether Vioxx caused the heart attack to the second phase.
Merck shares were down 31 cents, or 0.7 percent, to $44.30 on the New York Stock Exchange.
