Next Vioxx Trial Set to Get Under Way

Article in the Washington Post — Next Vioxx Trial Set to Get Under Way, by Janet McConnaughey of the Associated Press:

    The next federal Vioxx trial, which opens in federal court here on Monday, focuses
    on a man who began taking the painkiller after its label said that it could increase
    the risk of heart attacks.

    But Robert Garry Smith, 56, said he didn’t realize the drug, once a blockbuster for
    Merck & Co., might have brought on his February 2003 heart attack until he saw a
    lawyer’s television advertisement in 2005.

    “I was a perfectly healthy man until I took Vioxx and I had a heart attack,” Smith, a
    maintenance supervisor at a chemical plant in the Cincinnati suburb of Covington, Ky.,
    aid in a pretrial deposition.