Sherwood did not return calls for comment. Frazier said Merck has never had a policy of retaliating against doctors but has the right to "set the record straight" if it feels its products are being misrepresented.
Physicians including Dr. Eric Matteson of the Mayo Clinic said Merck should have acted more swiftly to determine Vioxx's cardiovascular safety profile after Vigor. Frazier said subsequent Vioxx trials were all designed to look at that profile and that as soon as the risk was established, the drug was withdrawn. He noted the Vigor study was widely publicized so doctors should have known the heart attack information.
"Any claim that Merck did not seek to fully understand the cardiovascular profile of Vioxx is contradicted by the facts," said Dr. Peter Kim, president of Merck Research Labs, at an earlier press conference.
Vioxx's label was changed in 2002 to reflect the Vigor study but lawyers maintain it wasn't strong enough and that the company continued to downplay the drug's risks. The Cook lawsuit charged that Merck had at least three programs to train sales representatives "to misstate and misrepresent the truly dangerous nature of Vioxx to prescribing physicians."
The materials are under court-ordered seal.
"There is no question the sales force downplayed the risk," said Matteson, a professor of medicine and a consultant to the rheumatology department at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Matteson said salespeople would discuss Vioxx's other side effects such as high blood pressure but said that when it came to heart attack risks, they would switch to talking about how the 2000 data was analyzed.
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On the Net:
www.merck.com
www.fda.gov
AP-ES-11-04-04 1321EST
