Scientist says FDA called journal to block Vioxx article

[leftchick]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-11-28-fda-vioxx_x.htm

~snip~

Just days before a medical journal was to publish a Food and Drug Administration-sponsored study that raised concerns about the safety of the arthritis drug Vioxx, an FDA official took the unusual step of calling the editor to raise questions about the findings' scientific integrity, suggests e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.

Lead author David Graham says the call was part of an effort to block publication of his research, an analysis of a database of 1.4 million Kaiser Permanente members showing that those who took Vioxx were more likely to suffer a heart attack or sudden cardiac death than those who took Celebrex, Vioxx's rival. Graham had reported his study in August at an epidemiology meeting in France, but publication in a medical journal would have exposed it to a wider audience.

Graham, associate director for science and medicine at the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, says The Lancet, a medical journal published in London, had planned to post the study on its Web site Nov. 17, a day in advance of his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee to testify about the FDA's handling of Vioxx.

Merck had pulled the drug from the market Sept. 30 because of safety concerns. Publication of the study could have embarrassed the FDA, which was being criticized for not warning patients sooner of Vioxx's cardiovascular risks.

[Brundle_Fly]

1. Fuckers.

Worried about being embarrassed? I think it is a little worse than that!

[Eurobabe]

2. Incest is best....

<sigh> makes you wnder what the fuck else they have "supressed??"

[snippy]

3. People need to understand that

this is what happens when people vote republican.

It absolutely enrages republicans to have this pointed out but it is true.

[enough]

4. FDA "virtually defenseless"

snip>

Graham told a Senate panel that the FDA is "virtually defenseless" against another "terrible tragedy and a profound regulatory failure" like Vioxx.

[Sara Beverley]

5. Between FDA, the NIH, and DHSS lies 60% of the healthcare problems

of this nation. The remaining 40% of the problems rest with pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. Research it for yourself. It's much more informative that way.

"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who can't"

[Ernesto]

6. Good reporting, leftchick.

This story needs to be Front Page across the country.

[thecrow]

7. I took Vioxx for a month and had a stroke

I only took it for maybe six weeks...Also had Kaiser as my HMO..... Hmmm

[leftchick]

9. That is awful!

are you okay? I took it for three days and hated it so I stopped. Whew!

[gratuitous]

8. Ahh, what do we need the bad old gummint for, anyway?

You don't seriously think a large corporation would put a product on the market that causes people's deaths, do you? After all, they could only make a few hundreds of millions of dollars and several people would be dead! Oh yeah, and we need to limit noneconomic and punitive damages awards. Call your congresscritter.

Besides, everybody knows that Vioxx might be bad for you! So what if the pharmaceutical company covered up and jiggered its own research in order to win FDA approval? Sure, they knew that out of the hundreds of thousands of prescriptions that would be written, several hundreds or even thousands of people would suffer debilitating, permanent injury, but there were millions of dollars in profits at stake! And without those profits, how could a large pharmaceutical company afford to keep running three or four ads nightly on the evening news to entice new consumers? What are you, against the free market and the development of potentially life-saving (that is, if they aren't life-ending) drugs?

{/corporatespeak}

Dang. You know, when the subject isn't tobacco, those arguments just look asinine.