CONFIRMED
Vioxx and the Painkiller That Broke Hearts
Vioxx was supposed to be a better painkiller. Approved in 1999 and marketed aggressively by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, it belonged to a new class of drugs — the COX-2 inhibitors — that promised the pain relief of traditional anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and naproxen without their tendency to cause stomach ulcers and bleeding. It was a blockbuster almost instantly, prescribed to some eighty million people worldwide and earning Merck around two and a half billion dollars a year at its peak. But sitting inside the company's own clinical data was a signal it did not want to see: Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack and stroke. A large Merck study had pointed to it as early as 2000, and rather than confront the possibility that its blockbuster was dangerous, the company offered an alternative explanation, kept marketing the drug, and — according to documents later revealed in court — trained its sales force to dodge doctors' questions about heart safety. It was not until 2004, when a second trial produced cardiovascular results too clear to spin, that Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market. By then a scientist at the United States Food and Drug Administration had estimated that the drug may have caused tens of thousands of excess heart attacks and deaths. This is the story of Vioxx: a drug that worked as a painkiller and killed as a side effect, a company that saw the danger and looked past it, and a disaster that exposed how poorly the system guards against a medicine that turns out to be lethal after it is already in millions of bodies.
