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Back in 2004, when Merck took Vioxx off the market, I remember reading that investigators believed the drug may have been responsible for as many as 50,000 deaths from heart attacks and strokes. 50,000! That must be a typo, I remember thinking, because, while the number appeared in various accounts, nobody seemed too upset about it. The story was played on the business pages, with more concern voiced about the hit on Merck’s stock price than on the victims.
In the years since, Merck’s lawyers, lobbyists and pr folks have done a pretty good job containing the damage. The stock has recovered. A class action suit was settled in 2007 for 4.85 billion, and federal suit charging illegal marketing has just been settled for $950 million. The Merck CEO at the time (he made $50 million over just five years at the firm) has landed a gig at Harvard, teaching tomorrow’s CEOs how he got away with it.
But a more interesting thing happened in the years since Vioxx got pulled from the market: the U.S. death rate mysteriously fell. Conservative writer and activist Ron Unz (he was behind the Massachusetts anti-bilingual education ballot question a few years back) has concluded that data indicate that the death toll from Vioxx was closer to 500,000. A half a million unnecessary deaths, and has anyone heard about it? No, because the major media put their efforts toward keeping up with the Kardashians and fretting about Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry.
It’s also because Vioxx, a pain medicine marketed to arthritis sufferers, apparently caused fatal heart attacks and strokes among elderly people who are prone to such episodes. Now that Vioxx is no longer being prescribed, something like 100,000 fewer fatal heart attacks and strokes are being recorded among the elderly population.
So where’s the outrage? Where are the demands for tighter FDA regulations on new medications? You aren’t hearing them, especially in Washington.
That is part of a pattern I’ve been noticing for awhile now: the willful denial of major events by those with an ideology impervious to reality. Two years ago, the Gulf Coast suffered the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but the drill-baby-drill crowd never missed a beat. Japan suffered the worst nuclear power catastrophe in history — a 50K dead zone now surrounds the Fukashima plant. Japan and Germany have sworn off nuclear power as a result, but there are no second thoughts in the U.S., even about relicensing plants, like the Pilgrim plant on the South Shore, built on the Fukashima model. Reckless trading on Wall Street crashed the world’s economy four years ago, but the gambling on derivatives continues as the finance industry and its friends in Washington work to blunt the watered-down regulations passed in disaster’s wake.
When you’ve made up your mind that government is more dangerous than unfettered corporate profit-seeking, then environmental disasters, or even 500,000 deaths traced to a bad drug, just don’t matter. Punch a kid in the high school hallway and you go to jail. Kill thousands through reckless research and false advertising, and you go to Harvard.
