Battle of the expert witnesses in the Vioxx trial

“The head pathologist at Baylor College of Medicine told jurors yesterday in the nation’s first Vioxx-related civil trial the once-popular painkiller could not have caused a Texas man’s death and that clogged arteries made him a ‘walking time bomb.’

‘No, and I say that respectfully,’ Dr. Thomas Wheeler said when asked by a Merck attorney if the drug caused Robert Ernst’s death. The answer was a direct challenge to the plaintiff’s theory that a Vioxx-induced heart attack led to the 59-year-old’s fatal arrhythmia.

Wheeler said blocked arteries led to the arrhythmia that killed Ernst, and that neither a heart attack nor a blood clot that could cause a heart attack were involved.”