Merck Wins Another Case
Tim Cavanaugh | February 18, 2006, 12:59pm
A federal jury in Louisiana has cleared Merck & Co. of responsibility in the death of a 53-year-old Florida man. Richard Irvin died of a heart attack in 2001, after taking Vioxx for less than a month. This was a retrial of the Irvin case, after a jury in Houston deadlocked on the decision in December. It's the second time Merck has been cleared in a suit over the drug, which the company withdrew from the market in 2004, and its first victory in a federal court. A Texas court found Merck liable in a Vioxx-related suit last August, while a New Jersey court cleared the company in November.
David Henderson and Charles Hooper made Merck's case last year. I ranted against the Merck jurors.
s.m. koppelman | February 20, 2006, 9:57am | #
That old Henderson and Hooper piece "made Merck's case"? More like "iterated through Merck PR's talking points". When I see a line like
they will be victims, not of Merck, but of an overly zealous and out-of-control legal and political system
in reference to the very kind of tort system libertarians are always saying should be the basis of settling disputes in the Platonic Movie-Western World to Come, little alarm bells go off in my head.
Then when I see, tossed in among what looks like a lot of very sensible, reasonable argument, a whale of a distortion like that bit on the numbers of people who die or are hospitalized due to GI problems caused by NSAIDs, the lights start flashing. Why the shift from incidence
rates to
counts? Maybe because the incidence rates are
low given the billions of doses taken each year, so low that they'd put those Vioxx numbers look a little less benign, especially when people at high risk for GI problems are already regularly instructed by their doctors to take acetamenophen and avoid NSAIDs.
To review, which sounds worse?
(1) An increase in heart attacks and strokes that affects less than one percent of users, or
(2) Going from one colon-polyp patient in 133 having a heart attack or stroke over a period of time to one in 66 if Vioxx is added to their regimen?
The former is the way Henderson and Hooper stated it. The latter is another, less obfuscated way of saying the same thing.
A doubling of heart attack and stroke risk among a population that has few such incidents per capita is Not So Bad. A doubling among a population of older patients with other health problems including high icidence of already-deteriorating cardiovascular systems means a lot more strokes and heart attacks per capita.
I don't know much about the Irvin case and can't say whether or not this is a just outcome, and I do agree that it's a shame that Vioxx isn't available to people for whom the benefits greatly outweigh the risks, but if that Henderson and Hooper piece is as good and honest an argument as can be made on Vioxx's behalf, my instinct should it return to the market is to think it's at least wise to prescribe it a whole lot less often than it was being prescribed.
