At least one Vioxx suit looks set to bite the dust

Bad news for a plaintiff in Alabama: Merck purports to be able to prove that the suing widow's husband can't possibly have taken Vioxx before he died of a heart attack a couple years ago.

This New York Times (yeah, I know) article is correct to point out that if this suit is dismissed it will be more a moral victory than anything else. After all, the facts of this particular case are just so bizarre. Although I will venture to add that, from my safe and uninformed distance low these many hundreds of miles away, this case appears to have all the ingredients of the litigation mess to come -- grieving widow, grasping lawyers and groundless charges.

As I have said before, Merck's "crime" was not that it marketed a drug that could have serious cardiac side effects. It was that the company marketed the drug to the wrong people. As sympathetic as we must be towards those who have lost loved ones to heart attacks while taking Vioxx, surely part of the blame lies with doctors who were too quick to prescribe the drug instead of over-the-counter alternatives that are safer for all but the small subset of arthritis patients for whom Vioxx-esque Cox-2 inhibitors really were a Godsend. And I suspect that in many cases we will never be able to sort out how much of a heart attack was caused by Vioxx and how much by deep-fried chicken and Burger King's Enormous Omelet Sandwiches.

All in all, good news from Alabama. But unfortunately, the rest of these lawsuits don't look set to go nearly so quietly into that good night.