Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[langostino]

osprey - your claims on Vioxx

You seem to have staked out the Merck p.r. position on wrongdoing, as though there was no gray area and no chance they shaded the truth. I disagree and so have a number of experts who have been warning of this for over 2 years now. They have presented fairly clear and straightforward data and information showing Merck deliberately spun things, if not outright covered them up.

Both the Journal of American Medicine and the journal Science have published clear evidence and warnings about the causal effects of the drug and elevated risk of heart attack, stroke and other side effects repeatedly -- with JAMA's first expose coming in August of 2001, more than 3 years ago. In the intervening time, the company has repeatedly invested in p.r. claiming no increased risk -- despite knowing better. They were repeatedly reprimanded by the FDA. They dragged their feet in doing follow-up studies.

This is a classic case of a company knowing it had a problem product and figuring it was cheaper and more expedient to try and cover it over with a mountain of p.r. and lobbying work.

Lost in the hubbub over the deaths and damage is the fact that the drug's effectiveness was never anywhere near what Merck invested a mountain of cash in a p.r. blitz to convince the public it had. This was shown in study after study.

The side effects only show up after 18 months? Nope. The studies show them in evidence after only 6 months and growing more and more evident. The 18 months number got picked up in the surficial popular press and is circulating in the echo chamber. When you dig, you'll find it's worse than the 18 month figure the company and FDA are using to try and cover their rear ends.

You're right about the FDA, their butt is in a sling too.

The effect is slight? Depends on how you define "slight" I guess. But this is a far bigger killer than Fen-Phen -- more than an order of magnitude larger, and that dog has cost Wyeth over $13 billion in damages thus far.

As for the lawsuits ... they started more than a year ago.
http://www.legalnewswatch.com/news_229.html


There is a bigger issue here and this is just the tip of the iceberg. These old-line pharma companies have been pushing drugs and compounds with very marginal benefit, balanced against increasingly damaging side effects, and investing huge amounts of money on lobbying and advertising to try and keep the lid on. If you've got a great and efficacious drug, you don't need to spend gobs and gobs of money on direct-to-consumer advertising to try and get people to put pressure on their doctors to prescribe stuff with elevated risks and dubious benefit.

These characteristics are not limited to Vioxx. They are a growing epidemic in an increasing corrupt industry. We are spending more and more for pharmaceuticals and deriving smaller and smaller marginal additional benefit.

There are mountains of evidence that Merck and other managements don't knowingly and willingly drive this, and it WILL wind up in front of a jury. I would NOT want to be a jury wouldn't be able to see human nature at work here, and figure out what's up. I suspect the reason polling of the American public shows the only industry whose executives are less trusted than Big Pharma is the tobacco industry. The public has got a pretty good idea what's going on. It's only a matter of time before it shows up in a verdict.