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Ellie,I suggest that your aiysalns is flawed, first, because you’re comparing deaths from side-effects to no deaths from side-effects, when you should be comparing death from side-effects to the total mortality that would ensue without side-effect causing drugs. All drugs have side-effects; t... Ellie,I suggest that your aiysalns is flawed, first, because you’re comparing deaths from side-effects to no deaths from side-effects, when you should be comparing death from side-effects to the total mortality that would ensue without side-effect causing drugs. All drugs have side-effects; the question for the patient is the trade-off. If someone has a 1 in 4 chance of suffering a stroke without medication and a 1 in 10,000 chance of suffering a heart-attack if he does, then the best option is to take the drug. No doubt this patient and Vanity Fair would be upset to find out that the drug’s producer suppressed evidence that the chances of suffering a heart-attack were actually 1 in 1,000; but would the patient’s choice have been any different? Come to that, would Vanity Fair be justified in telling its readers not to take the drug out of a sense of betrayal? I think not. But it certainly could, because it won’t face liability for pandering to conspiratorial thinking, which brings me around to my second point.While it’s true that the profit motive gives pharmaceutical companies an incentive to sell their wares, they not only lose customers with bad products, but they are liable for harms caused by their products. So regulation is not the only incentive to produce safe products. Moreover, to ignore the incentive provided by the profit motive, while at the same time invoking it as the reason for the creation of unsafe drugs is to look to have it both ways. The question really comes down to cost-benefit: will the cost of liability and non-returning dead customers outweigh the profit to be made off unsafe products? The answer to this is closer than you think. Not only is the illicit drug market completely unregulated, but it is liability-free (try suing your dealer); yet deaths from contamination or adulteration are a rarity. To my knowledge there’s no definitive study on this, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s rare that producers and dealers sell wholly counterfeit products. I’ve also heard of this memo and it doesn’t impress me. Journalists, crusaders, politicians and ambulance-chasers all have an incentive of their own when it comes to exploiting the public’s ignorance of medicine. Yet when someone dies because he ceased taking a medication that kept him alive after reading the latest ill-informed “gotcha†story, these groups cannot be held liable for their part in it. So it doesn’t surprise me that Big Pharma would gloat over suppressing evidence that might have exposed them to a massive and perhaps unjustified recall that would have grown out of the inevitable hysteria whipped up by the aforementioned groups.On a technical note, the fallacy arises from the ambiguity of the cause(s) of the deaths mentioned in the first sentence. The unspoken partisan premise is that these people died as a result of negligent clinical trials. But if you read the first sentence without presuming that drug companies caused the deaths (instead assuming the deaths were the result of complications or “mistakesâ€), then it links up with “mistakes†in the second sentence. It’s only when you import the suppressed accusation into the first sentence (i.e., that the deaths were caused by negligent clinical trials) that the prediction in the second sentence makes sense.
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(VISITOR) AUTHOR'S NAME
Sandesh
MESSAGE TIMESTAMP
16 december 2014, 18:06:45
AUTHOR'S IP LOGGED
62.210.78.179
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