Burnt Orange Report

Nine out of ten plaintiff's attorneys agree: Vioxx'll kill ya.

By Jim Dallas

I took off from work today to get ready for school, which starts Monday. Coincidentally, this mini-vacation gave me a chance to drive down to the Brazoria County Courthouse this morning (about an hour down the road from here) to watch plaintiff's closing arguments in Ernst v. Merck & Co., the first trial involving the pulled-drug Vioxx.

I called the 23rd district court clerk yesterday to get the time; she told me it was to start at 8:30 but to show up early. The trial didn't resume until after 10, but it's a good thing that I followed the clerk's advice; by 8:20 (when I got there), the courtroom was already jam-packed with on-lookers, mostly journalists and Houston-based attorneys (some of whom may have considerable amounts of money riding on Vioxx-related cases in the future).

Mark Lanier, for the plaintiff, gave a pretty good opening presentation, although some of the things he did seemed to go against the more conservative techniques described in my old civil procedure textbook. Rather than reserving more emotional appeals for the end, he scattered them throughout. Given the jury (which is, as a friend of mine who observed last week noted, is actually skewed towards young adults), this was probably appropriate, since a lot of the medical jargon thrown around wouldn't much of an impact if it weren't wound up in a dramatic narrative.

Basically, the plaintiff's case is this - that Merck & Co., who manufactured Vioxx, knew that Vioxx could cause blood-clotting and heart attacks; and that Merck, afraid to lose the millions of dollars it had riding on Vioxx, ignored these concerns and tried to dissuade doctors and patients from them through a decade-long campaign of "denial, deception, and damage". The result, say the plaintiffs, was that Vioxx caused the death of Carol Ernst's husband.

This certainly is a plausible narrative, although I imagine Merck's attorneys probably ripped into them. Unfortunately, I had to leave Angleton after Lanier's first speech to the jury, since I have commitments later this afternoon here in Houston and didn't want to have to leave the trial in the middle of the defense closing (that would be rude).

P.S. Here's the Associated Press write-up of what I saw.