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XCERPT THAT IS ABSOLUTELY COPPORATE PROPAGANDA:
Adverse jury verdicts came early in unfavorable jurisdictions. More
thumbs-down decisions followed in the company's class action suits,
eventually resulting in Dow Corning's decision to file for bankruptcy.
In 1998 the company agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement with breast
implant plaintiffs. Within the next year, however, new scientific
evidence emerged that exonerated silicone, and the FDA declared
silicone breast implants safe again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Breast Implants are NOT safe ... and the FDA never declared them so.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1100535366555
No Easy Prescription for Vioxx Litigation
Eriq Gardner
Corporate Counsel
11-19-2004
The huge popularity of the arthritis drug Vioxx has turned into a huge
liability for its manufacturer, Merck & Co. After a new study showed
that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks among its users, Merck
recalled the drug this fall. Now the 20 million people who have taken
Vioxx in the past five years have all become potential litigants.
Indeed, Merck, which is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., faces new
suits every day. Steven Scala, a drug industry analyst at SG Cowen &
Co., a New York-based investment bank, predicts that the drug giant
could eventually get hit with 600,000 suits and up to $10 billion in
damages. Other financial analysts have set their projections even
higher. (Merck officials, including general counsel Kenneth Frazier,
declined to comment for this article.)
Of course, Merck isn't the first company that's had to pull a drug or
medical device from the market. From breast implants to fen-phen,
these recalls have invariably resulted in an avalanche of litigation.
In-house lawyers and outside counsel who have handled recalls at other
companies say that whether Merck survives the Vioxx debacle depends on
its ability not to be overwhelmed by a frightfully expanding court
docket.
Steven Sokolow remembers the thousands of lawsuits Dow Corning Corp.
faced after the Food and Drug Administration forced the company to
take its silicone breast implants off the market in 1992. Sokolow,
who's still at Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning as an associate
general counsel in charge of litigation, says, "It was a brutal
experience." He adds, "It's overwhelming when cases start appearing
very suddenly, by the thousands every month."
Other lawyers who have dealt with recall nightmares say that Merck can
gain the upper hand by picking its battles. That means steering cases
into favorable jurisdictions, consolidating actions, and bringing the
weakest suits to trial first. If successful, these tactics can ensure
that early rulings set the tone for later fights. These experts
disagree, however, about the right time to settle.
All drugs require warning labels, and Vioxx was no exception. A study
published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2000 showed that
people taking even low doses of the medication were four times as
likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes as those taking other
painkillers. The FDA approved the drug anyway, but in 2001 sent a
letter to Merck (posted on the agency's Web site) warning the company
not to mislead doctors about Vioxx's cardiovascular risks.
The following year, Merck sponsored a new clinical study on Vioxx that
-- the company hoped -- would come out with favorable results. But the
effort backfired, and the new study confirmed the earlier findings
about Vioxx's risk.
According to The Washington Post, the new results were discussed on
Sept. 27 by Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin, research lab director Peter
Kim, and GC Frazier. They decided that they couldn't keep Vioxx on the
market, and the drug was pulled three days later.
Wall Street's reaction was immediate. Merck's share price plummeted,
and the company lost some $27 billion in market value. Plus, prominent
plaintiffs firms started taking out full-page advertisements in
newspapers across the country, looking to sign up aggrieved Vioxx
users as clients.
In the past, most companies who have had to recall a drug or medical
device have managed to survive. In 1983, for instance, some experts
predicted doom for Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals after it pulled
Bendectin, a morning sickness drug used by some 10 million pregnant
women. Yet the Cincinnati-based drug maker managed to limit court
damages and settlements to just $100 million total. (In 1995 Merrell
Dow was acquired for $5 billion by Hoechst AG, which is now a unit of
Sanofi-Aventis.)
Other companies, though, have found their exploding court docket just
too painful to bear. In 1995, three years after the FDA banned
silicone breast implants from the market, Dow Corning decided to exit
the medical device business and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection.
Financial analysts are currently debating whether Merck will share the
fate of Merrell Dow or Dow Corning. But lawyers are eager to prescribe
treatments for a massive product liability tort catastrophe.
According to Diane Sullivan, a product liability partner at Dechert,
the companies that pull through are the ones who are "smart about the
venues where the first few cases are tried." Sullivan is representing
Merck in Vioxx litigation, but she wouldn't comment directly on the
company's situation. However, Sullivan has prior experience in
multidistrict product liability litigation. Among other clients, she
successfully defended Baxter Healthcare Corp. against several hundred
suits involving its latex gloves.
Being smart about early cases may mean "settling some in bad venues,"
Sullivan explains, in order "to avoid the risk of plaintiffs gaining
early momentum via big verdicts in hellhole jurisdictions." She notes
that when Dow Corning lost an early courtroom battle in Texas in the
breast implant litigation, the defeat encouraged plaintiffs lawyers
and fueled further suits.
Dow Corning's Sokolow agrees. He explains that company officials
thought they should fight all plaintiffs quickly and aggressively, and
that they would win on the merits. Unfortunately for Sokolow's crew of
lawyers, their timing was off. Adverse jury verdicts came early in
unfavorable jurisdictions. More thumbs-down decisions followed in the
company's class action suits, eventually resulting in Dow Corning's
decision to file for bankruptcy. In 1998 the company agreed to a $3.2
billion settlement with breast implant plaintiffs. Within the next
year, however, new scientific evidence emerged that exonerated
silicone, and the FDA declared silicone breast implants safe again.
Not everyone agrees with the idea that a company should settle some
early cases if necessary to avoid unfavorable precedents. Jeffery
Carlson, a partner at Carlson, Messer & Turner in Los Angeles,
defended Merrell Dow after it recalled Bendectin. Carlson says that
the company won because it showed plaintiffs lawyers that it was
"willing to go to the mat and fight to judgment day."
While Merrell Dow serves as a model of how to survive a recall, the
company also established a judicial standard that could benefit Merck.
Thanks to a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell
Dow, federal judges now stand as "gatekeepers," charged with deciding
what kinds of scientific evidence can be presented in drug and medical
device liability cases.
According to Kin
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Breast Implants are NOT safe ... and the FDA never declared them so.
I'm not arguing, but could you post some sources backing that up?
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On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:01:05 GMT, "Falky foo"
<falkyfoo@bonksbcglobal.net> wrote:
Breast Implants are NOT safe ... and the FDA never declared them so.
I'm not arguing, but could you post some sources backing that up?
start here ... there are many many links:
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org
or here
www.BreastImplantInfo.org
or here
www.SiliconeHolocaust.org
It's not a pretty story.
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Ilena Rose wrote:
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:01:05 GMT, "Falky foo"
<falkyfoo@bonksbcglobal.net> wrote:
Breast Implants are NOT safe ... and the FDA never declared them so.
start here ... there are many many links:
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org
or here
www.BreastImplantInfo.org
or here
www.SiliconeHolocaust.org
It's not a pretty story.
Those are not "sources", they are propaganda.
Propaganda may be accurate, but,....
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On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:55:14 -0800, "Arthur L. Rubin"
<ronnirubin@sprintmail.com> wrote:
Those are not "sources", they are propaganda.
Far from it ... there are many links to studies ... FDA and otherwise
that show serious complications.
Over a quarter million women have already written the FDA with serious
compications from their implants.
www.humanticsfoundation.com/GreatLinks.html
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