Mercks CEO Ray Gilmartin (right) looks on at our hero!Insider starts the campaign, right here, right now! Read this long, but illuminating, interview. Here are a few quotes:
"The people who approve a drug when they see that there is a safety problem with it are very reluctant to do anything about it because it will reflect badly on them. They continue to let the damage occur. America is just as at risk now, as it was in November, as it was two years ago, and as it was five years ago."
"A very small proportion of drugs represent a new drug that hasn't been marketed before. Most of those drugs are no better than the ones that exist. If you want to talk about breakthrough drugs – the ones that really make a difference in patients' lives and represent a revolution in pharmacology – we're talking about maybe one or two drugs a year. Most of them aren't breakthroughs and most of them aren't lifesaving, but they get treated as if they were."
"I think that I was afraid that there would be a disaster, but I only became aware of this with the publication of the VIGOR Study, which was this large clinical trial that was done that showed that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack five fold. That study was published in November of 2000. It was written, performed, and paid for by industry. What industry concluded was not that Vioxx increases the risks of heart attack, but that the drug they were comparing it against – Naproxen – decreased the risk of heart attack. I knew that was not a sustainable argument. There was no way that Naproxen was that protective against heart attacks. Clearly Vioxx was the problem."
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Politics/vioxx101305.cfm
No comments:
Post a Comment