In China, Desperate Patients Smuggle Drugs or Make Their Own

China routinely violates tech IPs by Americans' own reporting; I'm surprised as to why they'd not do the same for drugs.

On the night of December 3, 1984, a cyanide cloud drifted over the streets of Bhopal, India, set loose by a leak in a nearby chemical plant. When the deadly fog lifted untold numbers of the city's residents--perhaps as many as 30,000, by some accounts--lay dead, while half a million others were injured. Dominique Lapierre, a French journalist and longtime champion of India's poor, joins with Spanish writer Javier Moro to recount the terrors of that night, about which the whole truth may never be known. The deaths are but one part of the authors' long, sometimes elaborate tale, which relates how the industrial conglomerate Union Carbide had come to build its vast chemical complex at Bhopal, one meant to be a glory of technology and, ironically, to save thousands of lives brought low by insect-wrought starvation. There are few villains but many heroes in the authors' account, which explores the margins at which good intentions conflict with the profit motive, at which cost-cutting omissions yield horrifically unintended consequences. It all makes for a thoughtful and disturbing book.

In reality, approvals are also about politics.

> consider the details of the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008. Unscrupulous businessmen had discovered they could save money by greatly diluting their milk products, then adding a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies throughout China had suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalization for kidney stones. Six died. A wave of popular outrage swept past the controlled media roadblocks and initial government excuses, and soon put enormous pressure on Chinese officials to take forceful action against the wrongdoers.

> China’s leaders may not be democratically elected, but they pay close attention to strong popular sentiment. Once pressed, they quickly launched a national police investigation which led to a series of arrests and uncovered evidence that this widespread system of food adulteration had been protected by bribe-taking government officials. Long prison sentences were freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger. Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in late 2007 under similar circumstances.

> In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx, its popular anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments. This abrupt recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a massive study by an FDA 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.

> Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.

> Although the Vioxx scandal certainly did generate several days of newspaper headlines and intermittently returned to the front pages as the resulting lawsuits gradually moved through our judicial system, the coverage still seemed scanty relative to the number of estimated fatalities, which matched America’s total losses in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media coverage often seemed considerably less than that later accorded to the Chinese infant food scandal, which had caused just a handful of deaths on the other side of the world.

Killing an old person 7 years before they would otherwise die is not as bad as killing an infant 78 years before it would otherwise die. But is it really less than 0.1% as bad?

So true, here you go: https://www.dw.com/en/cancer-drug-scandal-german-pharmacist-...

The free press and independent justice system makes the difference.

Some are incredibly kind and fair.

Some are incredibly immoral, who can be viewed as demon incarnations. See example like this: https://www.zhihu.com/question/53610601 (manufacture human monster slave to use as worker as fake beggar)

Exactly. When you have a culture that more often accepts scams as necessary to succeed and another culture that shuns them, you will probably see disparities in the percentages of people in those cultures who are willing to scam. Ostracism is a powerful deterrent.

This is a nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

There are more unarmed civilians (including children) murdered by US police every year than all deaths from the Chinese milk scandal combined.

Would that make it reasonable to state that "All US citizens have proved they have no conscience"?

In any case, the Chinese milk scandal pales in comparison to what Nestle did: https://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scand...

Do you no longer buy Nestle?

To call out an entire people as cruel and heartless is just so wrong!

this whole thing even sounds like dallas buyers club.

Sure, if the Jews were most of the population of the US and Europe instead of being about 2%.

The Hakka are the Jews of the East. (Or, in India, the Parsis are.)