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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13377

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: Journal Article

Charatan F.
94% of patients suing Merck over rofecoxib agree to company's offer.
BMJ 2008 Mar 15; 336:(7644):580-1
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7644/580


Abstract:

A large enough proportion of the litigants suing Merck after taking the drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) have agreed to the terms of the company’s offer to allow the settlement to go ahead.

Eighty five per cent of claimants had to agree to the settlement to proceed, and by the beginning of this month 94% (44 000 of the 47 000) had done so. The company announced in November a settlement worth $4.85bn (£2.41bn; 3.15bn).

The individual awards, estimated at $150 000 to $200 000 on average, will be calculated in a three step process to assess the severity of injuries. Plaintiffs must provide evidence of a heart attack or ischaemic stroke; proof that they received at least 30 rofecoxib pills; and evidence that they took at least one of the pills within 14 days of injury.

Merck withdrew rofecoxib, which averaged $2.5bn in annual sales, in September 2004 (BMJ 2004;329:816; . . .

Keywords:
Publication Types: News MeSH Terms: Cyclooxygenase 2 Inhibitors/adverse effects* Drug Industry/legislation & jurisprudence* Humans Lactones/adverse effects* Liability, Legal Myocardial Infarction/chemically induced* Sulfones/adverse effects* Substances: Cyclooxygenase 2 Inhibitors Lactones Sulfones rofecoxib

 

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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