Just shocked!!!
How could the FDA allow a pharmaceutical company and it's promising drug to harm so many people? A new report out today ups the number of Vioxx injuries from 25K to more than 139K.
What really sucks is that practically no one, even on the Right, and particularly on the Left, are questioning the news that Vioxx did the damage it did. Why so cynical, you ask?
For more than a dozen years, thousands of parents have questioned the safety of including the well-documented neurotoxin, thimerosal (50% mercury by weight), in many childhood vaccines and other substances injected into pregnant women, namely, RhoGam, to inhibit Rh incompatibility.
So how did the FDA, IOM and JQPublic handle these concerns?
They painted these parents, and the researchers who provided the incriminating data, as hysterical and delusional. "Grasping for straws" was the most often used phrase, along with "blinded by grief." Why this demonization of the victim?
Because our beloved pharmaceutical industry, and their purported governmental watchdog, the FDA, would never allow more than 30 million children to be intentionally poisoned. Such a possibility was just beyond comprehension for the American psyche.
And now Merck blows the whole thing with their negligent homicide of more than 100,000 adults, equivilant to the current death toll in Indonesia. The lawsuits will probably wipe out the corporate giant, and few are jumping to prevent such a bloodbath.
Yet when families of thimerosal/vaccine-injured children asked for an increase in medical-based research funding (versus mere epidemiological studies), the US government agencies responded with a firm, "No!", cutting off the flow of money to current medical research into the effects of thimerosal. The outcry from the media and public was deafening.
Not.
The parents of thimerosal-injured kids could have provided Vioxx watchdogs with a lesson or two in government and corporate malfeasance, if they'd only been willing to listen. Sadly, over a hundred thousand individuals had to learn that lesson on their own.
I imagine, too, that the perception of vaccine-injured parents hasn't changed one whit. Just in time for the next drug scandal.
Update: Eli Lilly (maker of, you guessed it, Thimerosal,) was just implicated in knowledge of Prozac suicide risk.
Posted by MB Williams at January 3, 2005 06:43 PM | TrackBackYesterday, I googled Peden-Adams and autism, just to see how the C.A.N. sponsored study regarding the dose-responsiveness of mercury was going. I am from South Carolina and thought this particular study would be irrefutable, and so had personal correspondance with Deborah Keil, who initially headed the study. Marjorie Peden-Adams of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) became the principal investigator after Deborah Keil left for a federal job.
What I found was very interesting to me. The Curriculum Vitae of Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D., came up. It states that he was a "Co-Principal Investigator" with Dr. Peden-Adams of the C.A.N. sponsored study "Mercury Toxicity in the Development of Autism:A Comparative Study Evaluating the Dose-Responsive Effects of Methyl Mercury and Thimerasol on Select Nervous, Immune, and Enzyme Parameters", the date being 2002-2004. This is the same study I had hoped would slap the "no evidence of harm..." CDC up the side of the head.
In 2003, Dr. Brown became the Principal Investigator of an ELI LILLY Initiated Trial of Amoxetine, blah,blah,blah... In 2004, Dr. Brown became the Principal Investigator, Eli Lilly Lecture Bureau, Child Health Psychology Conference.
Is it just me, or is the Quayle family values that are screwing us again??
(P.S., my son developed a Hypotonic-Hyporesponsive Episode to DTP at 2 months. It was a coincidentally a good day for a brain-swelling...but I'm not bitter.......)
Posted by: Rose at January 4, 2005 09:43 AMA small thing: The article said there were 88,000 to 139,000 heart attacks linked to Vioxx of which 30% to 40% were fatal. That makes the death count somewhere between 26,000 and 56,000 rather than "more than 100,000."
That's still a hell of a lot of people, but we don't want to give anyone the chance to distract from the point by nitpicking our arguments.
Posted by: LarryE at January 5, 2005 04:41 AM