“When Half a Million Americans Died and Nobody Noticed”
Such was the provocative title under which Alexander Cockburn ran a recent column discussing my China/America article in The Week, a British-based news magazine which claims a total American print circulation of over 500,000. We’ll see whether anyone notices that column either.
Cockburn’s question referred to my examination of the American mortality figuressurrounding the heavily-promoted anti-pain drug Vioxx, released by Merck in 1999 and pulled from the market in 2004 after a published FDA study indicated it seemed to double the risk of heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least tens of thousands of American deaths. I had noted that the major shifts in total American mortality bracketed by Vioxx’s introduction and recall—shifts which were concentrated in exactly those age-groups taking Vioxx and were due to the aforementioned heart attacks and strokes—may actually point to a total death-toll an order-of-magnitude greater than that initial scientific estimate. Continue reading →
This column of mine column appears on my new personal website, which collects hundreds of my writings from the last couple of decades across a wide range of topics and categories, including:
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