This starts with the court cases, but further down there are some interesting/understandable comments about side effects, clinical trials, etc.:
http://trusted.md/feed/items/system/2008/06/05/merck_vioxx_seventeen_and_three
From the article:
"Vioxx’s bad effects, though real, were also small compared to the
number of people who took it. (And the arguing continues when you try
to balance its bad effects with the good that it did for the patients
who really needed it, who were surely, though, a small subset of the
people who actually were on the drug).
Those last two sentences point to some of the problem. If Merck had
not tried to make Vioxx the pain drug for everyone in the world with
any kind of inflammation pain, it’s quite possible that its
cardiovascular effects would never have been noticed."
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