Very few states have the diversity and the variety of places to live, people to meet and climates like New York does. The huge variety in living styles between upstate and downstate New York is one of the reasons why people who grow up in New York tend to stay in New York. According to recent census numbers, the state of New York has an elderly population over 13 percent, putting it in the top quarter of all the states. Since New York has such a large elderly population, there is a good chance that there were many users of the drug Vioxx in New York. If you took Vioxx over the last few years, you should contact a lawyer right away.

Vioxx began life as a painkilling drug that was released by the giant drug company Merck in 1999. It got quick FDA approval and it almost immediately became one of the company’s best selling drugs. While Vioxx worked great at killing pain in general, it did an even better job targeting arthritis pain in the joints and throughout the body. This made Vioxx extremely popular for elderly people who suffered from the debilitating effects of arthritis. Sales of Vioxx were incredible, almost right from the start, and they only got bigger as time went on. In 2003, the last complete year that Vioxx was available to the general public, Merck made over 2 billion dollars from Vioxx alone. That means that 10 percent of the entire company’s revenue came from one drug.

However, within two years of the drug being on the market, reports began to trickle in from all over the country of an unusually high correlation between Vioxx users and people that suffer from heart attacks and strokes. The initial red flags were enough for Merck to conduct a series of studies themselves on the long term effects of taking Vioxx. The most famous of those studies, titled VIGOR, showed that after 18 months of non-stop use, Vioxx did in fact significantly increase the likelihood of having a heart attack or a stroke. By the time the VIGOR study was complete, it had almost become common knowledge among doctors and the elderly that had been using Vioxx that something just was not right about the drug. In 2004, Merck voluntarily pulled the drug from the shelves and admitted that there was a connection between serious health risks like heart attacks and strokes and the use of Vioxx.

Almost right away the lawsuits began to flood in. The most noteworthy of the early suits was one in the state of Texas where a woman was awarded 200 million dollars for Vioxx contributing to the early death of her husband. Hundreds of suits have followed, some of them class action suits that involved many different parties, some of them were independent suits. The rulings on these suits have been overwhelmingly positive. That is why it is important for you to contact a lawyer if you have taken Vioxx or if you lost someone close to you because of Vioxx complications. You can recoup lost wages, medical bills and even funeral costs from Merck. The more people that stand up to the drug companies, the less likely it will be that a similar situation like this will happen again. It was said that over 30,000 people died an early death thanks to Merck’s negligence. Contact a lawyer today to help put a stop to this.