Vioxx trial shows pharma companies abuse FDA?

All Americans now know that they cannot trust the FDA since it is very close to the pharmaceutical industry. For instance, pharma industry employs lobbyists specifically for the FDA. There are also more pharma lobbyists than members of Congress. FDA collects hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from pharma companies that makes up a major portion of its budget. And finally, drugmakers fund the election campaigns of (mostly Republicans) politicians.

So you would think that they would have warm feelings for each other. After all, the FDA pretty much does what the drug companies want. Well, it turns out in the world of business that nobody cares about what you do for them.

In the ongoing Vioxx trial of "Mike" Humeston versus Merck, there is a lot of disappointing news for FDA employees who are in bed with the pharma executives but are instead literally seen as whores by them.

"You were FANTASTIC," Edward Scolnick, president of Merck Research Laboratories until 2002, wrote to his Vioxx development team in a Feb. 8, 2001 e-mail (presented in the court by attorneys for the plaintiff) after a Merck presentation to an FDA advisory committee. "You made them look like grade D high school students."

When a colleague called the proposed warning about dangers of Vioxx "ugly" in an e-mail, Scolnick responded: "It is ugly cubed. They are #&$% (expletive)."

"I have never seen being nice to the FDA, except on rare occasions, pay off," he wrote in another e-mail.

"I assure you that I will not sign off on any label that had a cardiac warning," Scolnick wrote in a November 2001 e-mail referring to the cardiovascular risks of the painkiller.

Lesson: Don't write what you feel in an email. You never know when it will end up in court.

Related article: Merck deliberately ignored FDA warning on Vioxx safety risks