Greedy Trial Lawyer
Merck Is Not Flower People But What Is It?
Category: News Defused
Why did the Plaintiff lose the second of the Vioxx trials? It was not because Vioxx was a safe drug. Attorney William G. Pintas, posting on his Chicago Personal Injury Law Blog, tells us just how much Big Pharma has poisoned our society with its Show Me The Money approach to its products. He believes the jury that rendered the recent defense verdict in NJ gave the drug manufacturer a pass because Merck was just "doing buiness as usual" in America today. This may be a defeat that points the way to future victories.
I agree with Bill when he comments that the attitude of the jurors underscores a moral decline in our socient. Now, the job of trial lawyers in the upcoming Vioxx trials will be to focus on the sickness of a society that would accept and reward corporate conduct that knowingly harms consumers. We all lose if an unsafe product can be marketed in a devious and deceptive fashion to the general public. Profits cannot trump health.
Vioxx Jury: Corporate Deception is Accepted Part of BusinessIt is no wonder that Plaintiff Mike Humeston lost in his trial against Merck on Friday. Recent comments by the jurors in the trial indicate that corporate deception is not only common place, but accepted as part of business. The following is an except from the Wall Street Journal:
Juror Marie Kerr, a 51-year-old administrative assistant, said she and other jurors read through the emails while deliberating and felt many of the inflammatory lines were taken out of context.
"We read the emails completely, and not just the part that said 'bastards,' " she said. Ms. Kerr also said she wasn't moved by a Merck document titled "Dodgeball" that Mr. Seeger portrayed as a way to teach sales representatives how to avoid questions about heart attacks. "We've all seen games like dodgeball at our work," she said.
Overall, Merck succeeded in persuading jurors that concerns voiced by Dr. Scolnick and other executives were a normal part of the scientific process of discovery and of safety investigations. Vickie Heintz, a 40-year-old juror, said she felt Mr. Seeger "cherry picked" a few select emails and tried to impugn the company with them.
Ms. Heintz said she wasn't bothered by Merck's aggressive marketing of Vioxx or documents that showed the company calculating the loss in profits if the warning label was changed to reflect increased risk of heart attack. "Medicine is business," she said. "If I had a business I would calculate what the loss of one of my big products would mean...This is about making money. Merck doesn't do this because they are flower people."
Another juror, Patricia Harley, 44, said: "If someone peeked through all my emails, forget about it."
I do not question the result the jury found in this case. However I must comment that their statements afterwards are a terrifying wake up call to all Americans of the moral decline in our country. That a companies malfeasance is quickly justified by comments like "Merck doesn't do this because they are flower people" and "[w]e've all seen games like Dodgeball at our work" is scary to say the least.
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