April 11, 2006
Don't Get Sick
Don't invest in Pharmaceutical stocks, don't go into research, and for NED's sake, don't come down with a chronic disease!
WSJ.com - Vioxx Jury Adds $9 Million To Damages Merck Must PayIn an unexpected verdict, Merck & Co. will have to pay $9 million in punitive damages to a man who had a heart attack while taking Vioxx. The verdict came after a jury here concluded that the drug maker knowingly misled regulators about its troubled painkiller.
Last Wednesday, in the first phase of the trial, the jury awarded John McDarby, 77 years old, and his wife $4.5 million in compensatory damages for his heart attack, which the jury determined was caused by Vioxx. In this second phase, the jury was asked to determine what punitive damages, if any, Merck should pay Mr. McDarby.
Tysabri, a godsend to some advanced MS patients was pulled from clinical trials last year. The FDA has now given the green light, but nobody will protect the manufacturer from one of these ambulance chasers. A potential but rare side effect is a fatal brain infection -- that'll play well to the jury! Best to just let patients suffer.
I rail against the FDA as a murderous bureaucracy, but at least it exists under elected, executive branch authority. The tort bar is not elected -- I'm not talking about John Edwards. These people are effectively setting policy for trials and treatments.
The medications I take are decades old, but when I need something "stronger" or a new treatment, it is unlikely I will be given the chance, or that enough dollars will be invested in the sector to fund research. Screw the fund raising walks, we'd be better off marching on Washington for FDA rand tort reform.
Sorry if I'm grouchy. And I apologize to people who need COX-2 inhibitors for their quality of life but are not allowed to make their own decisions in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
A contraire, mon ami. Your grouchiness is rational and well placed. The FDA is, as you contend, a murderous bureaucracy. They effectively kill individuals in the most advanced society on earth by forcibly denying them access to the most advanced pharmaceutical products. They do this in the name of "safety" but the safety they try to gerrymander is a collective safety. Why? Because, in the words of former FDA commissioner David Kessler, "To argue that people ought to be able to choose their own risks is to impose an unrealistic burden on people."
The next step is for government to ban skydiving, crossing the street, and joining the navy.
For more on this see Alex Epstein's essay at: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=10859
Posted by: johngalt at April 11, 2006 3:19 PMJK, you have come to a conclusion that folks like you and I are essentially doomed. No new vaccines, no new cures, just dumb-ass studies that tell us George Bush causes cancer in rats due to global warming. I'm going to start a class action suit against the UN, US, DuPont and all Auto Makers because they did not tell me about the hazards that chewing on my steering wheel. Then I'm going after the lawyers for failing to sue before I got sick. Then I'm going to sue myself (someone has already done this) for pain and suffering by getting sick.
Posted by: mdmhvonpa at April 11, 2006 3:50 PMNo. mdmhvonpa, I don't know what's worse, giving up or really believing that constant links on this site to WSJ Editorials will do any good, but I'm in the latter, delusional camp.
Three thousand innocent Americans were killed on Sept 11, 2001 and it "changed everything." Ten times that number could have been saved from colon cancer if not for the FDA's two year delay of Erbitux. Sam Waksal and Martha Stewart went to jail, imClone imPloded, and 30,000 innocent Americans died of colon cancer.
Sorry to anyone bothered by the comparison. In a way it is grossly unfair. But the numbers make one stop and think...
Posted by: jk at April 11, 2006 4:07 PM | What do you think? [3]