Former Merck CEO Denies Hiding Vioxx Safety Data

Making his first appearance in a Vioxx trial, the former chief executive of Merck & Co. said Thursday that the company was forthright about the safety risks of its troubled arthritis drug during his tenure -- despite a jury verdict to the contrary.

Raymond Gilmartin, 65, who retired last year after 11 years of running the company, testified during a hearing to determine whether Merck should pay punitive damages in addition to the $4.5 million it was ordered to pay a former Vioxx user, who suffered a heart attack, and his wife.

Gilmartin spent the whole day on the stand, delaying until today the start of jury deliberations on punitive damages.

Dueling over semantics and Merck’s candor in the development of Vioxx, Gilmartin and plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier engaged in a series of civil but contentious exchanges.

Gilmartin rejected Lanier’s assertions that the company withheld safety data about Vioxx, which was taken by 20 million Americans before a study in 2004 linked it to increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Lanier, meanwhile, tried to show that Gilmartin put profit before safety in a bid to keep Merck’s stock price up, its Vioxx sales booming and his paycheck fat.

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that Lanier showed to jurors, Gilmartin was making about $3 million in salary and bonuses in 2000, when Merck received the results of a separate clinical study in which Vioxx users suffered five times as many heart attacks as those taking naproxen.

“But it had that value only if Merck’s stock price stayed above a certain level, right?” Lanier said, referring to Gilmartin’s compensation.

Lanier also showed the jury the text of a speech Gilmartin gave to Wall Street analysts two months later in which he made no mention of those results.

Asked if he would do anything differently, Gilmartin said, “What we did by science and so on, every step of the way, we tried to do the right thing.”

The proceeding came after a jury Wednesday found that Merck failed to warn doctors and the public about risks associated with the drug.

The jury said Merck was liable for 77-year-old John McDarby’s heart attack but not for the one suffered by Thomas Cona, 60, the other plaintiff in the case.