Vioxx was taken off the market in 2004, but analysts from the FDA estimated that it had caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in its five years on the market. It’s hard to be sure if that figure is reliable, but when you look at the pattern of how the information came out, it’s certainly felt, very widely, that both Merck and the FDA could have done much more to mitigate the damage done over the many years of this drug’s life span, after the concerns were apparent to them. Data in medicine is important; it means lives. Merck has not
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