Merck Maintains No "Global Settlement" Stance Despite Thousands of Vioxx Cases Filed to Date

U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon, the federal court judge overseeing the Vioxx MDL (Multi-district Litigation), announced on July 19, 2005 that the first federal court trial involving Merck & Co.’s withdrawn painkiller Vioxx has been set for November 28, 2005 in New Orleans.

According to plaintiffs’ lawyers involved with the Vioxx MDL, there are now approximately 2,000 Vioxx cases filed in the federal courts.  As of this time, no particular case has been selected to be the subject of this first scheduled federal Vioxx trial.  It is generally agreed among attorneys handling Vioxx cases, however, that Judge Fallon would prefer to start with a lawsuit alleging a Vioxx-induced heart attack.  Another distinction would be whether this first federal Vioxx case is a personal injury case, where the Vioxx user could testify about their Vioxx use and their heart attack, or a wrongful death case, where only the Vioxx user’s survivors are available.

The nation’s first Vioxx trial, which is currently under way in a Texas state court, is a wrongful lawsuit concerning the late Robert Ernst, a 59-year-old Vioxx user who died in 2001.  The Ernst case, according to the latest information provided by Merck, is just one of more than 4,200 Vioxx-related state court and federal court lawsuits that have been filed against the drug company across the country.

As reported previously, Merck maintains that there will be no "global settlement" of the thousands of Vioxx lawsuits that have been filed to date.  Many more Vioxx injury and Vioxx death lawsuits are expected to be filed in the coming months, and there is at least one "tolling agreement" established by plaintiffs’ lawyers and Merck’s attorneys which serves to suspend the applicable state statute of limitations for the filing of certain Vioxx injury claims and Vioxx death claims. "We’re going to defend each one of these cases individually," Merck lawyer Phillipp Wittmann said earlier this week. "They each present different sets of circumstances and facts, and it’s Merck’s intent to defend each and every one."

Upcoming Vioxx trials in state courts are scheduled for September 2005 to take place in South Texas and New Jersey.

(Posted by: Tom Lamb)