Women in Government, Merck's Trojan Horse: Part Three in a Series on the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer

In article ,
JOHN wrote:

"Myrl" wrote in message
oups.com...

You are free to believe what you wish!

you sure do

belief: Whatever an individual is willing to accept without direct
verification by experience or without the support of evidence, resulting in
assumption which is taken as a basis for action or non-action.

"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and
what I believe - I believe what I believe is right." -George W. Bush, in
Rome, July 22, 2001

Myrl and Coleen are classic examples of:

In the entire history of man, no one has ever been brainwashed and realized,
or believed, that he had been brainwashed. Those who have been brainwashed
will usually passionately defend their manipulators, claiming they have
simply been "shown the light" . . . or have been transformed in miraculous
ways. ------Dick Sutphen

Hey, resident loon, the quotation applies with equal force to you!

-- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
"[Republicans] talk about Reagan the way gay guys talk about
Barbra Streisand." -- Bill Maher

For 12 years I have watched the antics of Dow Corning and other breast
implant makers ... and I see Merck's dirty tricks are on a par with
theirs. I recall a Mentor (a current breast implant maker) submitting
a so called "study" with only 5% follow-up. Several "studies" dropped
the implantee when the implants failed and she removed them ...
whatever the reason.

Parents ... please be cautious about trusting your youngster's health
to Merck's vast public relations campaign to sell Gardasil.


http://ilena-rosenthal.blogspot.com

US: Plaintiffs Find Payday Elusive in Vioxx Cases

by Alex Berenson, New York Times
August 21st, 2007

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14662


In Carol Ernst's eyes, two years ago she won a measure of justice.

On Aug. 19, 2005, a Texas jury awarded Mrs. Ernst $253.5 million after
concluding that Merck & Company and its painkiller Vioxx had caused
the death of her husband, Robert, in 2001. At a news conference after
the verdict, Mrs. Ernst said she was pleased that jurors had punished
Merck for hiding Vioxx's heart risks. "This has been a long road," she
said. "I just know that it was a road that I had to run and I had to
finish."

But her comfort was premature. Merck, the third-largest American drug
maker, appealed the verdict - which Texas laws on punitive damages
automatically reduced to $26.1 million. Until higher courts rule on
the appeal, Merck is not obligated to pay. So Mrs. Ernst, 62, has yet
to receive any money.

In fact, none of the 45,000 people who have sued Merck, contending
that they or their loved ones suffered heart attacks or strokes after
taking Vioxx, have received payments from the company. The lawsuits
continue, for now in a state of legal limbo, with little prospect of
resolution.

In combating the litigation, Merck has made an aggressive, and so far
successful, bet that forcing plaintiffs to trial will reduce the
number of Vioxx lawsuits and, ultimately, its liability.

Promising to contest every case, Merck has spent more than $1 billion
over the last three years in legal fees. It has refused, at least
publicly, to consider even the possibility of an overall settlement to
resolve all the lawsuits at once.

The strategy's successes, from the view of Merck and its shareholders,
are clear. In the last year, the company has won most of Vioxx cases
that have reached juries. Though its stock plunged immediately after
the Robert Ernst verdict, it has since risen 80 percent, easily
outpacing those of other big drug makers. And estimates of Merck's
ultimate liability, once as high as $25 billion, are now closer to $5
billion, said C. Anthony Butler of Lehman Brothers.

The Merck executive most closely associated with the company's
strategy, Kenneth Frazier, its general counsel, has prospered. In
July, Mr. Frazier was promoted to president of the global human health
division, where he oversees the marketing and sales forces, half of
Merck's 60,000 employees.

When Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market in 2004, after a clinical
trial found that the drug increased the risk of heart attacks when
taken for 18 months or more, some predicted the company's doom. More
than 20 million people in the United States had taken Vioxx, and some
scientists estimated that as many as 100,000 might have suffered heart
attacks.

Merck said it had adequately warned patients and doctors of Vioxx's
heart risks and that it never knowingly endangered patients.

The pace of Vioxx-related lawsuits, after soaring in 2005 and 2006,
has fallen slightly this year, as plaintiffs' lawyers shy away from
cases where they lack strong evidence that their clients took Vioxx
for several months before having a heart attack. Lawyers have
withdrawn several cases as they were about to go to trial.

"It seems to have worked quite well," Peter Schuck, a professor at
Yale Law School who specializes in complex litigation, said of Merck's
strategy. "They have discouraged the plaintiffs' bar from litigating
these cases." The legal system is not set up to try thousands of cases
at once, and nearly all Vioxx lawsuits are caught up in the pretrial
process.

Plaintiffs' lawyers have tried to get the courts to combine all the
potential suits into a single class action. But judges have rejected
that tactic. Because the facts of individual cases can vary greatly,
each case must be tried separately, courts have ruled.

So far, fewer than 20 Vioxx suits have reached juries, an average of 9
in each of the last two years. At this rate, the backlog of Vioxx
cases will take years to work through and many plaintiffs may die
before they get their day in court.


Even if they win, it will take years for plaintiffs to be compensated.
Merck has appealed every case it has lost. In the case of Mrs. Ernst,
if her award is upheld, she will not be paid before 2010 at the
earliest, her lawyer, W. Mark Lanier of Houston, said.

After the 2005 verdict, analysts wondered how Merck would overcome
evidence presented in the case, showing that the company had been
concerned about Vioxx's potential heart risks as early as 1997, two
years before it began selling the drug.

"The possibility of increased C.V. events is of great concern," a
Merck scientist, Dr. Alise Reicin, wrote in a 1997 e-mail message."
"C.V. events" is medical shorthand for cardiovascular incidents like
heart attacks. "I just can't wait to be the one to present those
results to senior management," Dr. Reicin's message continued.

Other documents offered at the trial showed that in March 2000, Dr.
Edward M. Scolnick, then Merck's top scientist, said a clinical trial
had confirmed Vioxx's risks. Documents also showed that Merck resisted
efforts at the Food and Drug Administration to add clear warnings to
Vioxx's label.

Even after losing the Ernst case, Merck did not back down from its
strategy of fighting every case.

The company may have felt it had little choice, said Benjamin
Zipursky, a law professor at Fordham University, who has followed the
Vioxx litigation. Heart attacks are the most common cause of death in
the United States, and more than 105 million Vioxx prescriptions were
written in the five years before Merck stopped selling the drug. If it
had not taken a hard line, Mr. Zipursky said, Merck would have faced
an essentially unlimited pool of plaintiffs.

Merck has said it could not be certain that Vioxx caused heart attacks
before seeing the results of a clinical trial in 2004. The company has
also focused on making plaintiffs prove, with prescription records,
that they took Vioxx continuously for months or years before a heart
attack. It has also pointed out at trial that patients had other risk
factors, like obesity or high cholesterol.

"We're continuing our strategy of looking at each case on the
individual facts," said Theodore V. H. Mayer, a partner at Hughes
Hubbard & Reed, the law firm coordinating Merck's defense. "Did they
really have a heart attack? Did they really take the medicine? Did
they take the medicine in proximity to the heart attack?"

Mr. Mayer said Merck was trying to clear the backlog of 45,000 cases.
The company is moving through pretrial discovery - the process of
learning the basic facts in a case - in 500 lawsuits in New Jersey
alone, he said. The company faces 16,000 lawsuits in New Jersey.

Mr. Mayer said Merck had not yet found a single case where it believed
that Vioxx caused a heart attack. Heart attacks are "a very, very
common injury that occurs with or without medicine in many people," he
said.

It is that attitude that infuriates the plaintiffs' lawyers. They say
that since Merck has acknowledged that Vioxx can cause heart attacks
in people who take it for more than 18 months, the company should be
moving to settle some cases.

"Merck's goal is to manipulate the legal system to deprive justice to
tens of thousands of people whose cases can never be heard," said Mr.
Lanier, the lawyer who represented Mrs. Ernst. "Justice delayed is
justice denied."

He and other leading plaintiffs' lawyers say they will continue to
pursue cases against Merck.

Robert J. Gordon, a partner at the law firm of Weitz & Luxenberg in
New York, which represents about 3,300 Vioxx plaintiffs, maintains
that pressure on Merck to reach a broad settlement may increase in
2008.

Judge Eldon E. Fallon in New Orleans, who is overseeing the 8,000
federal lawsuits filed against Merck, and Judge Carol E. Higbee in
Atlantic City, who is overseeing state court suits in New Jersey, may
be tiring of Merck's refusal to settle, Mr. Gordon said. "The courts
are in the business of removing cases from their dockets," he noted.

But Mr. Schuck, the Yale law professor, said that plaintiffs might be
disappointed if they think that pressure from judges will get Merck to
settle. A faster trial calendar might actually benefit the company,
which can coordinate its defense experts and trial teams more easily
than the plaintiffs can, he said. And Merck's recent run of successes
- it has won five of the last six cases and seven of the last nine,
including one mistrial - has given it the upper hand, Mr. Schuck said.
"Nobody can make them settle," he said.

Of course, the case against Vioxx is not settled either, and Merck's
exposure continues. In the cases the company has lost, it has faced
large damage awards. And it still faces the possibility of a
class-action lawsuit from the insurers, states and other third-party
groups that provided insurance coverage. The New Jersey Supreme Court,
for instance, is considering whether a lawsuit should be allowed to
proceed as a class action or whether different insurers should be
forced to bring separate suits. Several state attorneys general have
sued the company, and federal prosecutors continue to investigate.

That leaves plaintiffs like Carol Ernst with little to do but wait.

"They could have all of their money and everything I own if they would
just give him back to me," she said of her husband. "But they can't do
that."

Ilena Rose wrote:

the dozens of Vac Machine "non profits"
funded by money funneled down by Merck.

Name two.

Can't do it? I didn't think so.
--
Peter Bowditch aa #2243
The Millenium Project http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles
Australian Council Against Health Fraud http://www.acahf.org.au
Australian Skeptics http://www.skeptics.com.au
To email me use my first name only at ratbags.com

comments not related to HPV vaccine deleted

Ilena Rose wrote:
For 12 years I have watched the antics of Dow Corning and other breast
implant makers ... and I see Merck's dirty tricks are on a par with
theirs. I recall a Mentor (a current breast implant maker) submitting
a so called "study" with only 5% follow-up. Several "studies" dropped
the implantee when the implants failed and she removed them ...
whatever the reason.

Perhaps you would be kind enough to show us where there was incomplete
followup in the HPV studies.

comments not relevant to the HPV vaccine deleted

Jeff

Vernono O wrote:
The government is made up of nattering women no matter what their sex.

Nattering? What does that mean?

"Jeff" wrote in message
news:E9hAi.1553$0_2.584@trndny07...
Vernono O wrote:
The government is made up of nattering women no matter what their sex.

Nattering? What does that mean?

Idle nonsense chatter

In article .com,
wrote:
On Aug 23, 11:52 am, Myrl wrote:
It is estimated that between 250,000 - 290,000 women a year globally,
die from Cervical Cancer. It has also been estimated that 70% of
these are caused by HPV virus, which could be prevented with Gardasil.

Myrl,

If Cervical cancer is caused somewhat by HPV and this is
transmitted sexually, where does the culprit HPV reside in the male?
( I am assuming a non-gay life style, unless HPV can live on a female
finger.)

Clearly, it can reside in the body, since it causes genital warts in
either gender.

Why does the testes not rot from the HPV, or the penis fall off.
Very confusing this.

Only to loons like yourself who don't believe HPV, as a virus,
actually causes disease. Viruses are often cell-type specific; in
this case, HPV causes cancer in cervical tissue. Men don't have
cervical tissue.

I hope I'm not going too fast for you here, "doc."

DrCee
Not a member of the church of making sense

-- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
"[Republicans] talk about Reagan the way gay guys talk about
Barbra Streisand." -- Bill Maher