March 27, 2007
A 52-year old Granite City, Illinois woman, Patricia Schwaller, had taken Merck's arthritis drug Vioxx for nearly two years before suffering a fatal heart attack in 2003. But a jury in Edwardsville, Illinois acquitted the drug company, finding Vioxx did not cause her death.
The jury rejected the plaintiff's case that Vioxx was a bad drug, with defects in its design and not enough testing before being approved as a painkiller.
Instead, the seven men and five women found that Merck had provided ample warnings about Vioxx's risks, and that Schwaller's physician was well aware of them when he prescribed the drug.
Merck's lawyers argued there were other, more probable causes of Schwaller's heart attack. They maintained her family had a history of the ailment, that she was morbidly obese, suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes, and lived a sedentary life style.
Merck has refused to entertain offers of a Vioxx settlement and has insisted so far on trying each case against it separately. In trials that have produced a jury verdict, the pharmaceutical giant has notched ten acquittals against five defeats. It faces at least 27,000 more lawsuits over the once-popular arthritis drug.
Vioxx was withdrawn from the market in September 2004 after a clinical trial showed that it doubled the risk of heart attack and strokes in patients who took it for at least 18 months.
