The New York Times, "Merck's Actions on Vioxx Face New Scrutiny"

          The spotlight is likely to be on Pfizer tomorrow when federal drug regulators begin hearings on cox-2 drugs, the class of arthritis and pain medicines that include the company's Celebrex and Bextra brands. After all, Merck, which made the other drug in that class, Vioxx, pulled it off the market last fall, citing its safety risks.
          But Wall Street analysts and battalions of lawyers will be intently watching testimony by and about Merck because the company faces hundreds of lawsuits over Vioxx, some of them scheduled to go to trial as early as May in Alabama and Texas. Consolidated groups of cases are headed for trial in California and New Jersey this summer.
          The three days of hearings by an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration are expected to include extensive testimony about how Merck and the federal agency dealt with safety concerns about Vioxx in the years and months before the company withdrew the drug.
          "Anything short of an outright condemnation of how Merck handled this drug will disappoint me," said a New York lawyer whose firm began filing lawsuits in New Jersey against Merck on behalf of Vioxx users in 2001.
          But a Merck lawyer said that he expected the hearings to underscore the lack of conclusive data - until last fall - that Vioxx was more hazardous than Merck had believed.
          The company's critics warned for years that Vioxx posed cardiac risks. But Merck said it had no clear evidence until it received interim results last September from a clinical trial of Vioxx's potential as an anticancer drug. That data indicated long-term users of the drug had an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.