Whatever happened to this once great company?
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Sunday, August 26, 2007
Merck Vioxx - Morally Bankrupt
Merck Legal Strategy makes it impossible for those damaged by Vioxx to receive compensation despite legal victory and evidence that the research upon which doctors and patients rely had been misrepresented (Link)
Whatever happened to this once great company?
Earlier|Later|Main Page
Whatever happened to this once great company?
Earlier|Later|Main Page
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4 comments:
Vioxx still has more than 13,800 lawsuits on the docket. Over the last two years, only four trials have been held, but Judge Carol Higbee is looking to pick up the pace — from glacier slow to snail-in-winter slow.
According to the New York Times, "With so many lawsuits, it’s entirely possible that many of the Vioxx plaintiffs will never see their day in court, or collect if they do win, because Merck is appealing every outcome that doesn’t go its way. For this reason, Wall Street believes Merck’s Vioxx liability is $5 billion, not the $25 billion or more that many once estimated."
I guess the lesson for Big Pharma would be: Sometimes it’s better for your product to suck a lot, rather than just a little. (Especially for your lawyers.)
The vIOXX Plaintff Eduation Group (VPEG) is a blog of almost 300 vIOXX victims - with much to care and share over. It works hard to provde much information and eduation versus sharing. It also has several items, involving working "the issues" which suggest some active goals.
The members are all respective of ech other. You will find a great of sympathetic vioxx victims that are the same boat as the average vIOXX litigant.
Feel free to check it out and join, nothing ventured, nothing gain. VPEG welcomes vIOXX victims that just wish information, wish to share, with to act, etc. - all are very userul to all!
The link is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MerckSettlement/
Sincerely
Dennis Harrison
badbonehealing
Catskill, NY
Vioxx Plaintiff
It’s true; Merck did go about their drug study publications in a rather unscrupulous way. Merck wasn’t ethical in its submission to the FDA for a number of reasons. Their studies presented the information on cardiovascular complications but did not make any conclusion from that data. Putting the primary focus on GI complications was misguided at best. Clearly someone needed to hold Merck’s review of its product accountable. If only there was an organization established for the purpose of analyzing all the data on a potential drug and approving or disapproving it. Such as the FDA perhaps. It seems evident that greater care should have been taken in checking back on all of Merck’s findings. Even if Merck itself didn’t point out potential cardiovascular dangers, the facts are right there. Merck’s findings included the 5 deaths while patients were on Vioxx. Four of the patients had preexisting heart cardiovascular conditions. That seems like a strong correlation. Strong enough anyway to warrant serious review. Merck shouldn’t have tried to get a dangerous drug marketed but the FDA can NOT allow that drug to get out to the public.
The fact that Merck has yet to make a single payment to any one of the “45,000 people who have sued, contending that they or their loved ones suffered heart attacks or strokes after taking Vioxx,” shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that Merck’s lack of a conscious was apparent even before Vioxx was put on the market. Merck had seen from the results of the clinical trials that Vioxx showed a higher percentage of adverse effects over both a placebo and ibuprofen. These results should have lead to more studies regarding the cardiovascular safety of Vioxx, but instead, when Merck submitted the results to the FDA in July of 2001, they simply used a counting method that minimized the appearance of any risk. In 2004 while conducting the APPROVe trial to find yet another indication for Vioxx (to increase the already thousands of people taking their drug that they knew increased the risk of having a stroke and heart attack) Merck terminated the study because of the large percentage of people who experienced cardiovascular problems. The number of people who experienced adverse effects must have been too large to conceal, because this is what led the voluntarily withdraw of Vioxx from the market.
I’m sure that all of the people awaiting their settlements feel the same as Carol Ernst, who lost her husband to a heart attack after taking Vioxx: "They could have all of their money and everything I own if they would just give him back to me, but they can't do that." It’s too bad “morally bankrupt” companies like Merck don’t care about people like Carol.
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