Merck, Reynolds, Wells Fargo, BofA, Morgan Stanley, Cordish in Court News

Merck & Co. doesn’t have to pay a $32 million jury award to the family of former user of the company’s Vioxx painkiller who died of a heart attack, the Texas Supreme Court ruled.
The court said on Aug. 26 that the family of Leonel Garza didn’t produce adequate evidence showing Vioxx caused the heart attack. Merck, the second biggest U.S. drugmaker, agreed in 2007 to pay $4.85 billion to settle thousands of injury claims over the drug.
Lawyers for the Garzas “did not present reliable evidence of general causation and therefore are not entitled to recover against Merck,” the state’s highest court concluded in an 18- page decision.
Kathy Snapka, one of the Garza family’s lawyers, didn’t immediately return a phone call or e-mail seeking comment on the Supreme Court ruling.
Officials of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck pulled Vioxx off the market in 2004 after researchers linked it to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Former users also criticized the company for downplaying the drug’s health risks and manipulating studies to help promote the drug.
Merck officials countered that Vioxx wasn’t the cause of users’ heart attacks and that the company had properly warned doctors and consumers about the painkiller’s risks.
Merck won 11 of the 16 cases over Vioxx that went to trial starting in 2005. Under the November 2007 settlement, Merck excluded some of the cases it lost, including Garza’s, from being included under the accord.
A jury in Rio Grande City, Texas, ruled in April 2006 that Merck failed to warn doctors of Vioxx’s risks and that the drug caused the fatal heart attack of Garza, 71, in 2001. The jury awarded $32 million to Garza’s widow, which Judge Alex Gabert cut to $8.73 million because of a state cap on punitive damages.
“Today’s decision reaffirms that there is simply no reliable scientific evidence that Vioxx caused” Garza’s heart attack, Ted Mayer, a lawyer for Merck, said in an e-mailed statement.