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This is a general tirade but it was instigated by that Vioxx settlement and a letter in the paper today. Merck just lost a ruling to pay some woman $256 million in a settlement about its drug Vioxx. Vioxx is a pain medicine, an anti-inflammatory used by arthritics without the side effects of narcotics. But it came with a risk of heart disease. And now some jury has awarded this woman Ernst a quarter of a billion dollars to compensate for the drug’s side effects and their effect in her husband’s death.
This is really getting ridiculous and all the letters in the paper today expressed outrage and dismay… all siding with Merck. Are these ludicrous sums of money really necessary? This is fostering the already absurd culture of blaming someone else for our problems and expecting unwarranted rewards in exchange. Some way to get rich.
This may be news to some people but everything comes with a risk, especially drugs. If you want the benefits, you must accept the risks. There is no such thing as a perfect drug that fixes your problem and leaves everything else untouched. Without going into pharmacology, let me just say that’s not how medicine or human bodies work. You can’t change just one thing, it all comes with a systemic alteration whose side effect may be just what you’re looking for but on the other hand, it changes something else that puts you at risk for something else breaking. Pick up a science book. All people do is ask and ask their physicians for help to fix something and all they hear is what they want to hear. Though they’re warned of the side effects, possible things that could go wrong, people always seem to go deaf around that part of the interview. On a similar note, everyone must be molre educated before cases like this go to trial and ignorant juries award obscene amounts of money. Though I suspect it doesn’t take much of an education to know monies that total a quarter of a billion dollars is obscene and it should be illegal to ask for that kind of money.
So what’s Ernst planning to do with it, a quarter of a billion dollars? Enjoy your vacations in the tropics, bitch, as people everywhere who knew about the risks of Vioxx and were willing to take them are now deprived of the drug thanks to you and that jury.
One of the letters in the paper was from an enlisted soldier in Iraq. He writes that if he dies on duty, his family gets $400,000 as a death benefit. But Carol Ernst got 600+ times more than that for her husband’s death from a drug side effect (a drug he took willingly). Is this man life worth more than a soldier’s? This is insane.
I hope Merck can hold out against the tide I know is coming of all the undereducated fools who will now jump on the bandwagon to capitalize on a negative drug side effect either real or imagined. This is how good companies go bankrupt and take the entire economy with them. Sleep tight.
Posted on August 24th, 2005 under General, News • 
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