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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

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Some people might react to your mass murder with an even less reductive and hostile response. e.g.:

Suppose there were another drug developed in secret, an anti-vioxx. It reduces your risk of all-causes mortality by a fraction of a percent. But it has these side effects:

1. Chronic pain. It's with you as long as you're taking your anti-vioxx and lets you know it's working.

2. Joint stiffness, often debilitating and sometimes leaving you practically chair-bound.

Would you take it? Should everyone take it? Should everyone be legally mandated to take it?

To make it a better mirror image, let's add a couple details to your anti-vioxx example: anti-Merck has hidden all the evidence of chronic pain and joint stiffness as side-effects, and taking it once will cause them permanently. The anti-FDA has approved the drug under fraudulent conditions as they lack the information that anti-Merck has. The drug is widely prescribed and now between 50 and 500 thousand (the exact number is not known due to poor reporting methods) people have new chronic joint pain. Should anyone go to anti-jail? ;)

(The latter condition was necessary to simulate the lack of knowledge patients had about their increased mortality, obviously difficult to reproduce in pain.)

I’m pretty confused with all this backwards talk. Can you be a little more clear about what actually happened?

Vioxx was like a super-NSAID. I took it for month in my 20s with a degenerative disc.

It was incredible, eliminating chronic pain and inflammation. It allowed me to function normally, sleep, etc.

The problem is, it causes heart attacks, especially if you are at risk for having a heart attack. The key study showed a 5x higher rate of heart attack for Vioxx users vs Naproxen.

Merck developed a drug to serve as an aspirin alternative for arthritis sufferers. Somewhere along the line, they discovered it could kill you, but pushed the evidence under the rug because they had already invested so much. The drug went on to get FDA approval (a process highly dependent on studies conducted by the manufacturer seeking approval, such that they had the opportunity to commit the fraud), and in the end between 50-500k individuals got heart attacks and other deadly consequences as a result of taking the highly prescribed painkiller.

that sounds much less dire than the crap that gets speed read during a typical pharmaceutical ad. if you have suicidal thoughts, stop taking... may cause death. may cause anal leakage.

meanwhile, they have some stage production with singing and dancing like it's everything's going to be great on the screen with bright vivid colors and lots of action while the very monotone voice speed reads the legal crap you're too overwhelmed to hear.

Also, it helps to mostly kill old people who are already sick. It makes it much harder for people to notice. Your drug might have killed them, but chances are they were going to die in the next 6 months anyway so the death didn't stand out. It also makes the death toll hard to tally.

65 is really not so old that anyone's likely to die in the next 6 months.

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