Even in long-term use cases, the plaintiffs are going to have to show that it was this drug and not their pre-existing risk factors and medical conditions that caused their heart attacks. That's just going to be a steep hill for these plaintiffs to climb.

The only question was whether the juror had been influenced, biased or prejudiced by a reference to her father. You want to make sure anytime there's a personal reference to a juror that they're not influenced in any way.

Merck would never do that.

We're in this for the long haul. Each case is different.

There really is no way to extrapolate [the verdict to other trials]. We defend these cases one at a time, and that's what we're going to continue to do.

We think the jury was not allowed to see and hear all the evidence.

Every evening after court, we have a trial team meeting in that conference room. We discuss the events of the day, what we need to do in planning for the following days and even a day or two beyond that.

It's like a clock in a basketball game: you start out with the number of minutes in the game and you count down.

This split ruling at least suggests that we need to look at these cases on an individual basis, as we have done in the past.