
The Vioxx Story  - wglb
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/vioxx
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niels_olson
Full disclosure: I'm a surgery intern who was taking a course in drug action
and design from an NIH immunologist at the time the Vioxx story was unfolding.
The real story is how industry lobbyists and Republicans push for a weak FDA
and the Dems push for more stringent regulations, which is just fine by the
industry so long as the regulatory funding never keeps up. It's essentially
another patent office but every new drug application that makes it to approval
comes with literally rooms full of documentation.

As far as loathing big pharma, they're really the only ones who can play the
game because the stringency requirements are so insanely high. Genuinely novel
discoveries might come out of universities, and small start-ups might get the
prototyps developed, but it's rare for them to survive on their own. They
usually end up selling to one of the big companies.

From 30,000 feet, the pharma industry looks a lot like the IT industry.

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ax0n
And this, folks, is why I loathe Big Pharma.

EDIT: okay, it's only part of it.

~~~
adatta02
Although you really have to question the effectiveness of the FDA if their
people were duped by such an obvious fabrication. Did no one just bother to
run the numbers themselves?

~~~
eli
I think you're overestimating the resources of the FDA

~~~
ax0n
++

The problem is EVERYONE is doing it. Always. The share holders practically
demand it. Also, I think it goes without saying that the original post overly
simplifies things a bit. If the pharm industry cooked the books to come up
with substantiating evidence that looked highly convincing, it doesn't
surprise me that stuff like this slipped by.

Previously: Climategate, Madoff, Enron, Sports doping, and so on and so forth
basically throughout the entirety of humanity's recorded history.

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jrockway
What happened to placebo-controlled studies?

