Houston ? The nation’s first federal Vioxx trial ended Monday with a hung jury, but the case involving the 2001 death of a Florida man who took the once-popular painkiller for a month will be retried, a judge said.

The mistrial leaves Vioxx’s maker Merck & Co. with the prospect of facing a new jury that could hear allegations that the company withheld information from the New England Journal of Medicine about a 2000 Vioxx study so that the drug would appear safer than it was.

Merck shares fell almost 3 percent as the trial’s outcome shook investors worried about the company’s liability in the thousands of pending Vioxx cases.

About 20 million people took Vioxx before Merck withdrew what had become a $2.5 billion seller from the market last year when a separate, longer-term study showed it could double risk of heart attack or stroke if taken for 18 months or longer.

“You can’t lie to people like the New England Journal of Medicine and get away with it,” said plaintiff’s lawyer Jere Beasley. “We look forward to the next trial.”

Merck lead attorney Phil Beck said last week’s revelations from the medical journal would be a “non-issue” in a retrial and that Merck supplied all the updated safety data to the Food and Drug Administration before the journal article was published.

The 2000 study, called VIGOR, has figured heavily in the first three Vioxx trials to reach juries – one in a Texas state court that Merck lost, another in its home state of New Jersey that the company won, and in the federal case conducted in Houston.

Merck Co. attorney Philip Beck speaks with the media after a mistrial was declared Monday in Houston in the first federal trial of a Vioxx-related case. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the case filed against the pharmaceutical giant by the family of Richard Irvin. Irvin died in May 2001 at 53, after taking Vioxx for one month for back pain.

Merck disclosed the full amount of heart attacks to the FDA that year.

“The FDA based all of its safety decisions and labeling and approval decisions … on the full updated information,” Beck said, meaning the data that said Vioxx caused five times as many heart attacks as naproxen.

The mistrial means Merck gained no momentum in its battle against about 7,000 pending state and federal Vioxx lawsuits and potentially billions of dollars in payouts.

The nine-member jury was about 20 minutes into its fourth day of deliberations when U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon called the jurors in and reminded them they had agreed Saturday to reach a verdict in a “reasonable time.”

“It has now been a reasonable time. We cannot get a verdict,” Fallon said, declaring a mistrial. Federal litigation requires a unanimous verdict.

Merck attorney Beck said Fallon gave the jury enough time.

“At some point if you are a judge you have to make a tough call and you say, You know what? They have been at it long enough and if I make them stay any longer, then people are going to be questioning whether the verdict … really reflects the consent of nine people or not,” Beck said.

The jury couldn’t decide whether Merck was liable in Richard “Dicky” Irvin’s 2001 death and whether the company failed to issue safety warnings that the drug could have serious cardiovascular side effects.

Merck argued that Vioxx was not a factor in Irvin’s death because he took the drug for about a month, and the long-term study that led to the drug’s withdrawal last year showed dangers only after 18 months’ use. The company blamed his death on clogged arteries and a blood clot that led to the heart attack.

Irvin, a former college football player who managed a wholesale seafood company in St. Augustine, Fla., got a prescription for Vioxx from his son-in-law, an emergency-room physician, without a medical checkup.

Fallon has said he intends to meet with lawyers about the possibility of a global settlement after the fourth federal trial wraps up.

The judge said he would confer with attorneys next week to set a retrial date. Beck said the retrial would likely be in February in its original venue of New Orleans. The trial was moved to Houston because of hurricane damage. The next state trial is scheduled for Feb. 27 in New Jersey.

Merck shares fell 72 cents, or 2.5 percent, to close at $28.41 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.