Merck Pays $4.85 Billion to Resolve 47,000 Vioxx Injury Claims

Vioxx reached pharmacies in 1999 as a prescription anti-inflammatory marketed by Merck for arthritis pain. Within a few years it had been prescribed to tens of millions of patients worldwide. Clinical data that emerged during a separate colorectal cancer trial showed that patients taking the drug for eighteen months or longer faced roughly twice the risk of heart attack and stroke compared to those on a placebo. Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market on September 30, 2004.

The lawsuits that followed were vast in scale. Plaintiffs alleged that Merck knew about cardiovascular risks years before the recall and chose to withhold that information from prescribing doctors and patients. Claims were consolidated into MDL No. 1657 before U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon in New Orleans. By late 2007, the docket held tens of thousands of cases, with Beasley Allen serving as one of the lead plaintiffs firms coordinating the litigation on behalf of claimants across the country.

Negotiations produced a $4.85 billion settlement announced November 9, 2007. The agreement was structured to resolve approximately 47,000 personal injury lawsuits, along with roughly 265 potential class action cases. Merck did not admit fault. To make the deal binding, at least 85 percent of the roughly 26,600 lawsuits covered by the agreement had to opt in, a threshold designed to give Merck certainty that the mass litigation was effectively closed.

Payments to individual claimants were tiered based on the severity of the injury alleged and the duration of Vioxx use. Heart attack and stroke survivors, and the estates of those who died, received amounts calculated under a claims matrix negotiated by plaintiff and defense counsel. The settlement was described at the time as the largest pharmaceutical litigation settlement in U.S. history.

Andy Birchfield and Leigh O'Dell of Beasley Allen were among the attorneys who worked the Vioxx litigation for the plaintiffs. The resolution closed out a three-year period of bellwether trials and negotiations that had drawn national attention to the obligations drug manufacturers carry when post-market safety signals emerge.