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August 19, 2005

Texas Jury Rules Against Merck in Vioxx Trial

AP reports in the Washington Post (free registration required) that a Texas jury has awarded $253 million to the widow of a "man who took the once-popular painkiller Vioxx." Here's a link to PIRG's Drug Safety page, where we are urging passage of an FDA reform bill, S 930 (Grassley-R-IA, Dodd-D-CT) to force the agency to do a better job. Currently, the FDA is extremely limited in its ability to both identify dangerous drugs and inform doctors and consumers about drug related health risks.

Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at August 19, 2005 03:10 PM


Comments

The pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars drugging school children and this is a form of genocide: condemning millions of young lives to a drug addicted future. They employ “experts� and lobbyist and hire ex FDA personnel and retired congressman to get pro-drug legislation passed. Newspapers and magazines receive billions of dollars a year in advertising, and investment firms make big bucks touting the latest snake oil; so it would be a rare article indeed that went against Big Pharma. The industry is motivated by the bottom line and shareholders not Science. A Google search of Ritalin and Cocaine, Prozac, chemical imbalance, school shootings, will show even the most skeptical that something is horribly wrong when 6 million school children ( plans are in place to increase this by 40% each year) are on anti-depressant drugs prescribed to handle “disorders� created to sell the drugs. Now after the Texas Vioxx decision Big Pharma's stooges are flooding their editorial outlets ( USA Today, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal) with demands that the government protect the drug companies. Michael

PS The decision by the Texas jury was rendered because the defendant couldn’t explain their faulty “science� to the common man. Something that contains lies is very hard to explain as it gets very complicated whereas that which is true is simple and easy to explain.

Posted by: michael hammond at August 24, 2005 10:47 PM

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