Kent Jarrell Quotations

Second Chance was the bad actor, not Toyobo. There was no conspiracy. Second Chance deceived Toyobo, the law enforcement community, and investigating authorities including the Department of Justice.

Cases we'll be looking at concern ingestion of Vioxx for 18 months or more by patients with limited heart risk factors.

It is apparent that Toyobo was duped by Second Chance. We were shocked by the level of Second Chance's deception when their behavior was finally uncovered because of documents that surfaced in litigation and through investigation.

Merck's actions were appropriate from beginning to end.

Merck didn't ask for any delays and is ready to defend any of these cases whenever they are scheduled.

Merck and the authors did everything in a proper scientific manner.

Merck acted responsibly, from researching Vioxx prior to approval in studies with almost 10,000 patients, to monitoring the medicine while it was on the market, to voluntarily withdrawing the medicine when it did. We based our decisions on the data from well controlled clinical trials.

We intend to try these cases one by one and that is exactly what we are doing.

We had made all the data available to the FDA, the medical community and the general public in all sorts of ways. So we felt the most proper and most responsible thing to do was work that process with the FDA and the medical community.

We have been waiting anxiously to file our appeal, but we have to wait until the judge formally enters the verdict. Usually that is done fairly quickly after a verdict is reached.

We'll look at a relatively small subset of cases. But we have no intention of entering into a global settlement of any kind.

We could decide to settle others. We are not entertaining the notion of a global settlement.

This is not a normal Vioxx case, which is about heart attacks and strokes being increased by the use of the drug, ... We plan on making it about the specifics of causation. ... This is a good case for us.

For a relatively small set of cases that involve patients who used Vioxx for over 18 months, we will take a close look.

The new filings are not unexpected and do not change our strategy. Right now we are concentrating on defending each and every case we face.

The company has always said that every case presents a different set of facts. We will make a reasonable decision in how to proceed in defending each case.