The John Coltrane, Johnny Hartman album is superb. Please listen to it.
But first -- read this by Alexander Cockburn -- it's a little something about how much we here in "the land of the free, home of the brave" value human life.
I'm sure you will find it interesting. Of course, you must follow the link to the original.
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When Half a Million Americans Died and Nobody Noticed
By Alexander Cockburn, The Week
12 May 12
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7052594566599226451#editor/target=post;postID=6176324730681048071
Was the US drug Vioxx responsible for far more deaths than has been acknowledged so far?
RE American lives cheaper than those of the Chinese? It's a question raised by Ron Unz, publisher of
The American Conservative,
who has produced a compelling comparison between the way the Chinese
dealt with one of their drug scandals - melamine in baby formula - and
how the US handled the Vioxx aspirin-substitute disaster.
The Chinese scandal surfaced in 2008, shortly before
the Beijing Olympics. Crooked dairymen diluted their milk products, then
added a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent
protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies across
China suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy
hospitalisation for kidney stones. Six died.
Long prison sentences were handed down and a couple of
the guiltiest culprits were tried and executed for their role.
Throughout these events, American media coverage was extensive, with
appropriate sneering about the Chinese leadership's indifference to
human life.
Four years earlier, in September 2004, Merck, one of
America's largest pharmaceutical companies, issued a sudden recall of
Vioxx, its anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related
ailments.
The recall came just days after Merck discovered that a
top medical journal was about to publish a study by an FDA (Food and
Drug Administration) investigator indicating that the drug in question
greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had
probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the
five years it had been on the market.
It soon turned out Merck had known of potential lethal
side effects even before launching Vioxx in 1999, but had brushed all
such disturbing tests under the rug.
With a TV ad budget averaging a hundred million
dollars per year, Vioxx swiftly became one of Merck's bestsellers,
generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Twenty-five million
Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute
thought to produce fewer complications.
There was a fair amount of news coverage after the
recall, but pretty slim considering the alleged 55,000 death toll. A
class-action lawsuit dragged its way through the courts for years,
eventually being settled for $4.85 billion in 2007.
When the scandal first broke, Merck's stock price
collapsed, and many believed that the company could not possibly
survive, especially after evidence of a deliberate corporate conspiracy
surfaced. Instead, Merck's stock price eventually reached new heights in
2008 and today it is just 15 per cent below where it stood before the
disaster.
The year after the scandal unfolded, Merck's long-time
CEO resigned and was replaced by one of his top lieutenants. But he
retained the $50 million in financial compensation he had received over
the previous five years. Neither he nor any other Merck executives was
charged with corporate malfeasance.
Senior FDA officials apologised for their lack of
effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. The Vioxx
scandal began to sink into the vast marsh of semi-forgotten
international pharmaceutical scandals.
Then in 2005, as he now remembers it, Ron Unz "was
reading my morning newspapers, as I always do, and noticed tiny items
about an unprecedented drop in the American death rate. Hmm I said, I
wonder if that might have anything to do with all those other stories
about that deadly drug recently taken off the market and all the
resulting lawsuits."
The year after Vioxx was pulled from the market, the
New York Times and other media outlets were running minor news items,
usually down-column, noting that American death rates had undergone a
striking and completely unexpected decline. These were what Unz, a
dedicated news browser, was reading.
Typical was the headline on a short article that ran
in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in
Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American
deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of
the nation's population. Government health experts were quoted as being
greatly "surprised" and "scratching [their] heads" over this strange
anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.
For his Chinese melamine/Vioxx comparison, Unz went
back to those 2005 stories. Quick scrutiny of the most recent 15 years
worth of national mortality data provided on the US Government's Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention website offered Unz some useful
clues.
"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates
occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop
occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn," says Unz. "Vioxx was
almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes
in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the
65-plus population.
"The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to
deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes,
and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national
mortality rates."
The impact of these shifts, Unz points out, was not
small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall
American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by
approximately five per cent, despite the continued ageing of the
population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per
year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.
"Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be
proven," Unz continues. "But if we hypothesise a direct connection
between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause
fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in
the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses,
then the statistical implications are quite serious."
Unz makes the point that the users of Vioxx were
almost all elderly, and it was not possible to determine whether a
particular victim's heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other
factors. But he concludes: "Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American
deaths may have resulted from Vioxx [my italics], a figure substantially
larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck
during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our
political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility."
I remarked to Unz that it seemed truly incredible that
a greater than expected death rate of this dimension should scarcely
have caused a ripple.
"I'm just as astonished," he said. "From 2004 onwards,
huge numbers of America's toughest trial lawyers were suing Merck for
billions based on Vioxx casualties - didn't they notice the dramatic
drop in the national death rate?
"The inescapable conclusion is that in today's world
and in the opinion of our own media, American lives are quite cheap,
unlike those in China.
"Besides," says Unz laughing, "it shows the stupidity
of our political leaders that they didn't seize upon this great
opportunity. They should have just renamed Vioxx the 'Save Social
Security Drug,' and distributed it free in very large doses to everyone,
starting on their 65th birthday. Maybe they should have even made it
mandatory, three times per day. At sufficiently large levels of national
consumption, Vioxx could have almost singlehandedly eliminated all our
serious budget deficit problems. 'Vioxx - The Miracle Anti-Deficit
Drug'."
Pro
boxer Manny Pacquiao is slamming President Obama by calling for
homosexuals to be put to death. Yeah, I've never heard of him either,
but hey, he was once on the cover of TIME Asia.
