Posted on 07/10/2012 11:08:30 AM PDT by To-Whose-Benefit?
And so, the Vioxx saga continues. Nearly eight years after Merck withdrew the controversial painkiller over links to heart attacks and strokes, a new paper indicates the drugmaker hid evidence that Vioxx tripled the risk of cardiovascular death for more than three years before taking the pill off the market in 2004. During the same period, the paper in the American Heart Journal notes, Merck had regularly insisted such an increased [risk] did not exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at pharmalot.com ...
Martha Steward went to prison.
These death dealing criminals, should be imprisoned for life with no parole. The company should be bankrupted, sold for parts, dissolved and the families of the dead repaid to the fullest extent available. Everyone from the test scientists, the CEO and all senior staff should stand trial for murder or conspiracy to commit.
If they get a fine that is a fraction of their profits, what signal does that send?
If any state in which an individual died as a result has the death penalty, the trail should be there, just to send the message that this is a serious problem that should never happen again.
With the Obama care nightmare, the last thing we need is for these companies to just LIE about their products to make a buck.
Hanging really is, in this case, too good for them.
Check the Vioxx settlement.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-22/merck-agrees-to-pay-950-million-to-settle-u-s-government-s-vioxx-probe.html
Merck paid a $950 Million Fed Fine and plead guilty to a Misdemeanor Misbranding charge.
AFTER, they’d ALREADY PAID the surviving family members of 3,468 people they Killed with Vioxx while they were breaking the law by marketing the stuff illegally.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-27/merck-paid-3-468-death-claims-to-resolve-vioxx-suits.html
They admitted they broke the law, and that they were responsible for killing 3,468 people, and DOJ let them buy their way out of it.
Even without the human suffering these people are responsible for, stunts like This are a big part of how healthcare itself became so expensive we finally got hammered with a complete Govt takeover under Zero. We’ve been so busy paying to put people back together after drug companies Knowingly injure them, and our DOJ keeps letting them buy their way out.
A little clarity, perhaps.
To start with, Vioxx, by itself, much like other NSAIDs, including aspirin, had the slight side effect of slowly dissolving arterial plaque deposits. Nothing really unusual or unexpected, and considered to actually be a mildly good side effect.
However, when you *mixed* Vioxx with other NSAIDs that had that same effect, suddenly and dramatically you had the equivalent of arterial Drano. Big chunks of arterial plaque would break off in the blood stream, which was extremely bad, causing heart attacks and strokes.
So, what happened in this study was that people would take Vioxx to good effect for a while, then after discontinuing taking Vioxx, they would need a pain reliever again, and more than two weeks after stopping the Vioxx they would still get the Drano effect.
Two weeks is a very long time with liver metabolism, so it suggests that as soon as they discontinued taking Vioxx, they started taking other NSAIDs, with just residual Vioxx still in their system, so didn’t show the Drano effect until more than two weeks later.
What really got the manufacturer’s attention was a cardiac study of people with severe plaque, who were given Vioxx with another chemical that also had this effect. Taken at the same time was much worse than taking one than the other, and these cardiac patients started having severe problems so fast that they discontinued the study and put the survivors under intense observation. Which they needed.
So until this cardiac study, any bad side effect of Vioxx was so peripheral that it wasn’t particularly obvious. After the fact their data can be reviewed and it seems obvious.
I will add that a long time ago, when this issue first turned up, I read a suggestion that this Drano effect might actually be used therapeutically. The idea is that a long stretch of very plaque filled artery might be bypassed, then a blood substitute “oxygen therapeutic” (which carries a lot more oxygen than ordinary blood), be used to keep the artery alive, while using an optimal Drano solution. The plaque would disintegrate and be filtered out, then once the artery was ‘clean’, it would be restored to the system.
Addicted isn’t actually the right word, but yes, Perry did sign an executive order attempting to shove a series of 3 shots of Gardasil into every 11 yr old girl in Texas, in return for what I’ve been told was about $30K from Merck.
I’ve posted on that stunt before and taken endless flack for it, and so far as I’m concerned, when my detractors and name callers left the field they Also left their colors along with their arguments behind, lying in the mud.
If you want a look at what the people working at Merck think of Gardasil and their own company:
http://www.cafepharma.com/boards/showthread.php?t=476247
The questions I want answered out of Perry’s mandate are since He was the Governor, and He’s supposed to be a Conservative
1: How did the morals of 11 yr olds in Texas sink so low under Conservative Ric Perry that they All need to be protected from HPV? You don’t get it from doorknobs. It requires penetration to infect.
2: How did Ric Perry KNOW that the morals of 11 yr olds had sunk that low?
Thanks for the link. What all the pushers of Gardasil don’t tell you up front is that the only way to catch the virus is through sexual activity. They trot out Gardasil as some solution to the ever present danger of cervical cancer without mentioning that perhaps abstinence is the best medicine. In fact, evidence shows that by the time mature women are getting cervical cancer the effects of the early vaccination would have been useless.
Here’s another keeper.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16689555
“37 studies using a wide variety of surveillance methods were identified from 12 countries. These generated 43 numerical estimates of under-reporting. The median under-reporting rate across the 37 studies was 94% (interquartile range 82-98%).”
The Trillion Dollar Regulatory Agencies entrusted with oversight of these companies are doing Such a wonderful job that the public has NO CLUE as to how much damage is being done.
94% of drug adverse events never even get reported.
3 years ago FDA was complaining it needed another Billion or so for new computers because the system they had couldn’t process the AERs they had in it.
http://lamplightersoftware.com/dsm.php
Then one guy served them with FOIA requests and what’s on that last site came spilling out from the same computers FDA needed to replace because FDA couldn’t get the info out themselves, until they got FOIA-ed.
To paraphrase Jack, the Joker, Nicholsen,
“Bob, This entire Industry needs an enema.”
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