Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12343

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Pfizer's Celebrex gets break in court
New Jersey Business News 2008 Jan 10
http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2008/01/pzizers_celebrex_gets_break_in.html

Full text:

A state court has ruled that plaintiffs suing Pfizer Inc. over its pain medication Celebrex do not have reliable scientific evidence to prove the drug can cause heart attacks and strokes at the 200-milligram dose, reports the Associated Press.

New York Supreme Court Justice Shirley W. Kornreich said:“The scientific evidence, whether for a heart attack or stroke, is just not there,” according to New York-based Pfizer.

The ruling is similar to one in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, where Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled in November that lawyers for the more than 3,000 plaintiffs failed to produce “scientifically reliable evidence that Celebrex causes heart attacks or strokes when ingested at the 200 milligram a day dose.”
Pfizer said it believes the decisions together could result in the dismissal of many Celebrex cases, as the majority of the cases are pending in these two courts.

Pfizer intends to challenge the admissibility of evidence that doses higher than 200 milligrams a day might cause heart attacks or strokes. Neither the New York nor the federal district court ruling excludes all expert testimony concerning the risk of heart attack or stroke affiliated with those higher doses.

In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed the risks of drugs such as Celebrex and Vioxx, known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and concluded they should include a label warning patients of increased risk of strokes and heart attacks. As a result, thousands of patients sued Pfizer and Vioxx-maker Merck & Co.

All the federal claims against Merck were consolidated in New Orleans; the claims against Pfizer were consolidated in San Francisco.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909