More on the Vioxx scandal. Vioxx is an antiinflammatory drug like Advil, except in many patients it works better. Too bad, because it causes a greater-than-acceptable increased risk of heart attacks.* When Merck published the safety data in and around 2000, the company intentionally withheld and deleted data on three heart attacks to make the drug look safer. They submitted all the data on a diskette, but failed to include it in the landmark paper that made their drug a huge success.
The nation's top medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, called them out on it recently:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051209/...oxx_journal_dc
There is no direct article right now. Apparently it was a press release from NEJM.
Merck knew about the heart attacks and failed to put the material in the manuscript. The FDA pulled Vioxx from the market due to an increased risk of heart attacks in 2004. Too bad for some people because for them it really worked. But not so useful if you are dead.
Should the people at Merck be held criminally liable for their actions?
* As for "greater-than-acceptable" risk of death, it is good to be on a forum where people understand probability. The typical knee-jerk response is that no risk of death is tolerable from a medicine. Everyone who says this DRIVES to their doctor's office, often on crowded freeways while using a cell phone. That carries a significant risk of death and yet many a drug with a safety profile better than driving to the doctor's office (like Accutane) get heavily regulated or thrown out. Vioxx is not one of those: the risks of heart attacks remained small, but there were acceptable and available substitues that did not cause the problem. Much of the added risk was unnecessary and not associated with additional gain.
So, again, you are on the jury: the junior exec whose pay and future were tied up in the success of Vioxx knew the data were fudged and submitted the falsified manuscript anyway. Should that junior exec do jail time? How much and what kind? What's red collar crime worth?