Texas attorney general Greg Abbott announced yesterday that he has filed a lawsuit against Merck & Co. in state court alleging that the company bilked Texas out of about $170 million in Medicaid payments by misrepresenting the safety of its Vioxx painkiller. Although a flurry of personal injury lawsuits have been filed against Merck throughout the country after the company pulled the Vioxx drug late last year, Texas is apparently the first state to file such a suit against the company.
A one-time popular arthritis drug, Merck voluntarily withdrew Vioxx from the market last fall after a study of cancer patients correlated use of the drug with an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. As is typical in such situations, the numerous private lawsuits that have been filed against Merck allege that the company knew of potential problems with Vioxx, but disregarded them and marketed the profitable drug anyway.
Greg Abbott is one of the genuine good guys in Texas politics, but he is wandering far afield with this latest salvo against Merck. As Dr. Rangel has noted here and here, lawsuits such as this follow a troubling pattern of attempting to feed off of the sensationalism and publicity of a side effect of a new and popular drug. It’s not at all clear that Merck did the right thing in pulling Vioxx off the market, but the mainstream media and plaintiffs’ personal injury lawyers have seized on the company’s removal of the drug from the marketplace by drumming the theme that Vioxx is an excessively dangerous drug that could kill you. Not mentioned in such propaganda is the fact that there are plenty of other medications on the market that have side effects that are more common and worse than those of Vioxx, but those drugs remain on the market for patients who are willing to risk the side effects of the drugs to obtain the benefits from them.
As one doctor observed in the Wall Street Journal awhile back, given the known side effects of aspirin, that drug “probably couldn’t gain FDA approval today.”