Vioxx: Everyone loses

I've been despondent for weeks over this. We should not have lost a drug this good because its sponsor, Merck & Co, were a bunch of unethical jerks. We should not have lost it because a zealot at the FDA decided that sacrificing the people who need Vioxx was worth it to punish Merck. We all lost. I know I am not the only one for whom this drug was a godsend. The risks were tiny, even after all the revelations of data suppression. So what if Merck screwed up? The proper solution would have been 1) to require a "black box" labelling, to let us, the patients, decide what kind of risk to take, and 2) to punish the dishonest executives personally, and perhaps to fine the company. Instead of punishing the liars, we let them off and punished the shareholders of the company.

It is symptomatic of our all-or-nothing society that no one was able to come up with a solution that didn't involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's disgusting.