Every now and then, a highly profitable pharmaceutical will come along that everyone also knows is quite dangerous.
Remarkably, rather than this stopping the product, it will often be pushed to market and the profits it generates will be used to ensure any objections to its safety get ignored and blown to the wayside.
One of my goals in writing has hence been to review the scandalous history of some of the most dangerous pharmaceuticals on the market.
This was done both to help those being harmed by them (e.g., consider the story of statins and the story of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs) and to illustrate that the horrendous malfeasance we’ve observed from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) throughout COVID-19 has been its standard operating procedure.
For example, I recently covered the story of Merck’s Vioxx, an unsafe and unneeded painkiller that was kept on the market until outside investigators proved it was causing heart attacks and strokes (estimated to have killed 120,000 people by the time Vioxx was withdrawn), something Merck was fully aware of from the start.
Hellbound and Down 