Vioxx and Tort

We have two systems of drug regulation in the United States, the FDA and tort law.  Unfortunately, neither system works well.  FDA incentives push for excess delay and excess cost and the tort system appears random if not perverse in its operation with good claims receiving nothing and bad claims receiving billions.

Writing in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki discusses some relevant research from Kip Viscusi:

Merck would seem to have one big thing in its favor: the company
voluntarily withdrew Vioxx from the market. But while Merck executives
may have hoped to persuade people that they were acting responsibly,
plaintiffs’ attorneys have taken the withdrawal as an admission of
guilt…internal
company documents show that Merck employees were debating the safety of
the drug for years before the recall.

From a scientific perspective, this is hardly damning. The internal
debates about the drug’s safety were just that–debates, with different
scientists arguing for and against the drug….While that kind of weighing of risk and benefit may be medically
rational, in the legal arena it’s poison. Nothing infuriates juries
like finding out that companies knew about dangers and then “balanced”
them away. In fact, any kind of risk-benefit analysis, honest or not,
is likely to get you in trouble with juries….Viscusi has shown that
people are inclined to award heftier punitive damages against a company
that had performed a risk analysis before selling a product than a
company that didn’t bother to. Even if the company puts a very high
value on each life, the fact that it has weighed costs against benefits
is, in itself, reprehensible. “We’re just numbers, I feel, to them” is
how a juror in the G.M. case put it. “Statistics. That’s something that
is wrong.”…

Before a jury, then, a firm is better off being
ignorant than informed.

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