I am in awe of this article. It has two verifiable pieces of information - a FDA study indicated that Vioxx was responsible for 55,000 deaths and that Merck had known about lethal side effects before launching the drug.

The key point in the article? A magazine publisher with no background in epidemical studies does a "quick study" of the CDC website and says that "perhaps" 500,000 deaths resulted from Vioxx.

Then there's about 10 paragraphs of hand writing and alarmism before we get to the befuddling conclusion that "in today's world and in the opinion of our own media, American lives are quite cheap, unlike those in China. "

I hardly know how to unravel that.