I'm not one of these "tort reform" ghouls, who are really 9 times out of 10 just paid frontmen for giant business interests, but this jury award ain't gonna fly.
ANGLETON, Texas - A Texas jury found pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. liable Friday for the death of a man who took the once-popular painkiller Vioxx, awarding his widow $253.4 million in damages in the first of thousands of lawsuits pending across the country.
A seven-man, five-woman jury deliberated for 10 1/2 hours over two days before returning the verdict. Merck said it plans to appeal.
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The damages award combines Robert Ernst's lost pay as a Wal-Mart produce manager, mental anguish, loss of companionship and punitive damages. He was 59 when he died.
Somehow, I don't see the lost wages of a 59 year old Wal-Mart employee adding up to anything close to 253 mil. That's a lot of compensation for loss of companionship.
This award is going nowhere.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050819/ap_on_he_me/vioxx_trial_40;_ylt=Aqql0D2dtQq7AXnVTDHNL22QNI4v;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Posted by mike at August 19, 2005 04:34 PMThe pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars drugging school children and this is a form of genocide: condemning millions of young lives to a drug addicted future. They employ “experts” and lobbyist and hire ex FDA personnel and retired congressman to get pro-drug legislation passed. Newspapers and magazines receive billions of dollars a year in advertising, and investment firms make big bucks touting the latest snake oil; so it would be a rare article indeed that went against Big Pharma. The industry is motivated by the bottom line and shareholders not Science. A Google search of Ritalin and Cocaine, Prozac, chemical imbalance, school shootings, will show even the most skeptical that something is horribly wrong when 6 million school children ( plans are in place to increase this by 40% each year) are on anti-depressant drugs prescribed to handle “disorders” created to sell the drugs. Now after the Texas Vioxx decision Big Pharma's stooges are flooding their editorial outlets ( USA Today, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal) with demands that the government protect the drug companies.
PS The decision by the Texas jury was rendered because the defendant couldn’t explain their faulty “science” to the common man. Something that contains lies is very hard to explain as it gets very complicated whereas that which is true is simple and easy to understand.
On an unrelated note, how about a multiple choice analogy game?
drug companies : genocide ::
michael hammond: ___________
a) insanity
b) hyperbole
c) ethnic cleansing
d) blasphemy
e) suicide
If you manage to clean the prenatal fluid out of your eyes, you'll find the theory of correlation between truth and comprehensibility is demented. Unless of course I'm lying, in which case you may never be able to unravel the meaning of my sordid assault on your expert analysis.
Posted by: Cam on August 29, 2005 01:15 PM