Safe & Effective #7: Remember Vioxx?
A "safe and effective" drug killed tens of thousands of Americans in the early 2000's. Let's take a look at what happened.
There is a lot of news to cover on the “Safe and Effective” front. More and more damning evidence is coming out each day, and there’s a backlog of at least 5-7 articles I hope to start drafting over the long weekend.
In the meantime though, let’s look back on the case of Merck’s Vioxx product. Vioxx was a prescription painkiller that was brought to market and obviously was deemed “safe and effective” by the FDA and went to market in 1999.
There was just a little problem: it roughly doubled your chances of having a heart attack. Whoopsie! Of course, this wasn’t realized instantly… it took five years for this to be uncovered and for Vioxx to be pulled from the market in late 2004.
But actually, the signs were there all along. To quote a 2012 story on the topic:
The recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a study by an FDA (Food and Drug Administration) investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market. It soon turned out Merck had known of potential lethal side effects even before launching Vioxx in 1999, but had brushed all such disturbing tests under the rug.
And hey, it’s not just like they knew about it and just remained silent. Vioxx was a best seller! Merck spent $100 million a year promoting the shit out of it on TV and elsewhere.
That 55,000 death estimate is echoed in several estimates in that range, but it also may be quite low. You had 25 million Americans on the drug as soon as it was halted the U.S. saw a “baffling” drop in deaths of over 50,000 per year despite a growing and aging population. To quote the same 2012 story:
Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation's population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly "surprised" and "scratching [their] heads" over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.
The fact is, we won’t ever know exactly how many more people died as a result of Vioxx. It’s almost definitely tens of thousands. It quite possibly could be hundreds of thousands. But the essential elements of the story are this:
Drug company invented a product, hides/minimizes known risks.
Drug company guides it through to FDA approval, it is deemed “safe and effective.”
Product advertised heavily and given to tens of millions of Americans.
Doctors, none the wiser to the harms, continue to prescribe the product for years.
Product kills enough people that the truth becomes impossible to hide. Five years later, the product is removed from the market.
The company is fined, and settles a class action lawsuit, but no one goes to jail and no changes are made to the system that allowed this to happen.
Fairly quickly, the story and the lessons are forgotten.
Does that story… sound familiar? It should. We’re playing the same game right now.
Nothing changed in 2004 when Vioxx was pulled. If anything, pharmaceutical companies became emboldened, knowing they could get away with murder, literally, and face no real repercussions.
Obviously, the fact that this happened with Vioxx doesn’t mean that the same thing is happening with Covid vaccines. But you have to understand the system that produces these drugs. If you can’t trust the system, you can’t trust the products that system produces.
Vioxx is undeniable proof that the system for bringing drugs to market is broken. The system failed, led to 50,000+ American deaths, and then nothing changed. The regulators still approved it, the doctors still prescribed it, and the TV ads were still showing smiling faces…. all while grandpa was having a fatal heart attack.
We’ll get back to the Covid shots in our next post, as there is a huge and growing pile of evidence that the Covid products are indeed the successor to Vioxx in almost every way. This time though, we must not let the lesson be forgotten and we must not let the perpetrators of this fraud get off scot-free.