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A multinational drug company that made a painkiller that had to be withdrawn from sale because it was found to cause heart attacks may have hidden the death rate from the authorities for several years, it was claimed yesterday. Internal company documents released during litigation in the US suggest that Merck, makers of Vioxx, gave the US Food and Drug Administration only selected data on deaths in its clinical trials, and failed to include people who had a fatal heart attack soon after coming off the drug.
The documents also show that papers published in journals on the results of Vioxx trials were ghostwritten by employees or contracted medical writers, and that leading doctors were later invited to be named as authors. Financial links were sometimes but not always declared.
Have we reached a new low in Pharmco sleaze?
Geee, sounds like this could be in the plot of a movie. Have a doctor find out about this, go to kill him and instead kill his wife… Paging Harrison Ford and the one-armed Man.
I had triple by-pass not too long after coming off of Vioxx.
Sad part about all this crap is that Vioxx was pretty damn good at relieving my pain.
I kept the empty bottle just in case I want to sue someone.
😉
“sued out of existence–but too often that gets money to the wrong people”
Sorry to disagree.
Getting money to the injured party, rather than the lawyers, is a good thing – but not the main point of this type of suit.
Large monetary penalties and widespread bad publicity is the goal, so they stop their bad behavior. Those are messages in the only language they understand.
I am also in favor of criminal actions against the individuals who knowingly participated – added to the publicity and monetary penalties against the corporation.
If the lawyers make money along the way, so be it. If it’s more than the plaintiffs get so be that as well.
What other protection do we have when the government is bought? We’ll never get mandated pay scales for executives – and I wouldn’t want them.
off the drug, off my list eh?
I forgot the latest round of horseshit. Trasylol is the newest one showing up in the ambulance chasers commercials as it is purported to cause kidney failure and or death. My Father had vascular surgery and suffered kidney failure. He was on dialysis until he died.
Hmm, I wonder if there is a link.
My Mother was given the fabric patch to cover an abdominal hernia. Recalled because it may cause colon perforations. A few months later my Mother’s colon ruptured and she almost bleed to death and ultimately suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and lays in a nursing home now.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for big drug companies.
I knew that this sort of malfeasance must have been involved as soon as I read the list of findings that weren’t submitted, many months ago. Simple deduction is too much work for our media, apparently.
Just a reminder; conservative estimates are that Vioxx unnecessarily killed 100,000 Americans. We invaded two countries and killed hundreds of thousands of people for the loss of 3000 Americans.
If there is any real justice in this world, the US Air Force will bomb Merck out of existence. But I don’t think that will happen.