You could put what I know about high finance in a thimble and still have room for a side order of fries. Nonetheless, occasionally some news sifts up from the Wall Street babble that makes me prick up my ears.
For instance, this week I heard that the stock market surged, briefly rescuing the economy before tanking by week's end. The bulk of that surge was credited to profits by Merck, the pharmaceutical company. That rang a bell. Merck. Merck. Hey, aren't they the ones who killed or sickened 100,000 Americans over the four years their painkiller Vioxx was on the market? Weren't they the ones who kept the drug on the market despite its high risks of heart attack and stroke (500 percent higher than competing drugs)? Yes, that's the one!
Only three years after inflicting such medical carnage, Merck is driving the stock market, with growth of 23% over the past year and second-quarter profits up 12%. Dr. Kevorkian goes to prison for years for assisting a handful of patients who want to die. "Dr." Merck kills thousands who don't want to die and yet stays free and easy, and even prospers. Indeed, Merck has not only recovered, it's riding a wave of profits from a number of new drugs that were fast-tracked to the market by the Food and Drug Administration.
Alas, there is one disclaimer to Merck's mercurial comeback: a percentage of its second-quarter profits had to be set aside for, according to CNN, "legal fees associated with litigation involving the company's arthritis drug Vioxx. Merck is facing 27,000 lawsuits filed by people who claim to have been harmed by the widely used pill, which was withdrawn in 2004 after being linked to heart attacks."
Leave it to the corporate media to soft-pedal the crimes of the corporations they cover (and by whom they are often owned). First, Vioxx was used by more than arthritis patients. Second, the drug wasn't just linked to heart attacks; it caused strokes as well. The trail of damning evidence is staggering: Merck knew the drug was risky before it even went to market and yet withheld its own evidence, filed lawsuits against medical journals that issued warnings, harassed medical experts who questioned their results by threatening to cut off research funds to the universities where they worked and, in one case, got a highly respected expert (Dr. Eric Topol) fired for telling the truth.
There is a direct link between pharmaceutical lobbying and legislation that benefits drug companies. According to the Washington Post, drug makers spent $900 million on lobbying between 1998 and 2005—more than any other industry. For this payout—bribe money—they received kid glove treatment from the Republican Congress (three-quarters of their candidate donations went to Republicans, according to the Post).
That money trickles down to the FDA, which is responsible for approving new drugs through its corrupted Office of New Drugs (OND) and monitoring the safety of drugs once they're on the market through its underfunded Office of Drug Safety. Despite the availability of other effective painkillers—and scads of medical evidence of its harm—Vioxx was approved on a fast-track basis by the OND.
For the next four years, Vioxx made as much as $7 million a day for Merck. At that point, Merck was the Suge Knight of drugmakers, the nation's leading pill pusher. As we all know, Republicans fawn over anyone or anything that makes scads of money. Largely through the efforts of FDA whistleblower Dr. David Graham, Merck got caught. In Graham's testimony before Congress, he said the delay by the FDA in bringing Vioxx's risks to light cost the lives of "between 26,000 and 55,000 Americans." Your grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents may have been among them.
The coup de disgrace, though, is that Merck officials pretended that they "voluntarily" withdrew the drug from the market as soon as they heard of its risks.
Bullshit. Or should I say Bushit?
