Ten of the 32 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisers whose total votes favored the controversial painkillers Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx had financial ties to the industry.
According to public records and disclosures in medical journals, the 10 advisors had recently consulted with the drugs’ makers.
Although most (8) of the 10 members said their ties did not influence their votes, had they not voted the advisory committee results would have been as follows:
14 to 8 to keep Vioxx off the market
However, the advisors with company ties voted 9 to 1 to keep Bextra on the market and 9 to 1 to bring Vioxx back to the market.
It’s commonly known that researchers who work with industry serve on FDA advisory panels; the agency says it works to balance expertise with potential conflicts of interest. However, the FDA often keeps such ties secret from the public and experts say studies have shown that money does influence scientific judgments.
The 10 advisors had worked in some capacity for Merck, Voixx’s maker and Pfizer, which makes Celebrex and Bextra.
San Francisco Chronicle February 25, 2005
Bloomberg February 26, 2005
Dr. Grisanti's Comments:
Financial ties have a way to sway one's vote. Of course we would hope that this would not be the case, but this article obviously speaks volumes..
No wonder there are hundreds of class action suits. I am confident that these drugs wouldn’t have been voted favorably if financial ties weren’t involved.
There was no other way that Vioxx could have been approved and be allowed to injure and kill even more people.
I realize that is a bold statement, but the facts are quite clear.
It appears that the number of deaths caused by Vioxx will be revised upwards to between 89,000 to 139,000 (the data is for the United States alone). Andrew Jack of the Financial Times who interviewed Dr. David Graham, an expert at the FDA, is reporting that the data is likely to be published in the medical journal The Lancet.
In the initial estimates provided by the FDA, 27,785 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths between 1999 and 2003 were attributed to Vioxx. Dr. Graham has provided these estimates in subsequent statements and since then most analysts have put worldwide deaths to be somewhere in the range of 150,000 to 200,000.
I am convinced that you will continue to see a growing number of lawsuits from attorneys around the US. Not only will people being filing suits against the manufacturers of Vioxx, but you will also see more lawsuits against the makers of Celebrex and Bextra.
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