IN RESPONSE TO THE NIELSEN HAYDEN POST BELOW, Kevin Menard emails that the problem is more general:

Killing the sales of Vioxx has screwed me and a lot of others. My misspent youth left me with a lot of joint pain and Vioxx made it go away. Period. None of the others seem to work as well. Would I trade increasing risk of heart disease to be able to run with my kids? You bet, especially when you look at the studies and see the odds for those of us otherwise healthy.

A meteorite would be too quick…

Yeah. I’m all for drug safety but I really worry that relatively minor risks are being inflated to kill off important drugs, and that that will chill research into new medicines. And I wonder how Public Citizen would fare if they were held as accountable for their statements and actions as the pharmaceutical companies are for theirs.