NEW ORLEANS - He was an FBI agent for 27 years, including time in an anti-terrorist unit. Now 62-year-old Gerald Barnett has a different sort of case: the second federal trial accusing drug manufacturer Merck & Co. of hiding information that its blockbuster painkiller Vioxx could block up blood vessels.
Jury selection in Barnett's lawsuit against Merck is scheduled to start today before U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon. The trial is expected to take about two weeks.
Barnett had taken Vioxx for 2 years and 8 months when he had a heart attack in August 2002. He was 58, and needed a five-way bypass operation.His suit is among more than 16,000 state and federal suits against Merck.In seven state or federal trials so far, the company has lost three.
According to court papers, his doctor has said that if Merck had disclosed the drug's risks earlier, he would never have prescribed it for Barnett. As it was, Barnett, who had retired from the FBI to Myrtle Beach, S.C., kept taking the drug even after the heart attack, and until a few weeks before it was pulled from the market in September 2004.
Merck alerted the FDA in June 2000, about seven months after Barnett started taking Vioxx, that a study showed heart attacks occurred five times as often in patients taking Vioxx as those on another drug, called naproxen; Merck said the difference was caused by protection from naproxen, rather than damage from Vioxx. The drug's label didn't note the different heart attack rates until April 2002, a few months before Barnett's heart attack.
The company pulled the drug from the market after another study showed that it could double the risk of heart attacks.Barnett's trial had been set to start a week ago, but it was postponed so Barnett could have surgery to unclog an artery that had been open in 2002.
In seven state and national lawsuits tried so far, Merck has lost three and won four. One is ongoing in California.
Source: JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer
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