Dr. Aseem Malhotra: ” So when the FDA were alerted that there was a cardiovascular problem with Vioxx, that at least double the risk of heart attack, strokes, death, for example, they wrote to Merck. And what did Merck do? They ignored that the FDA said there should be a black box warning on the packaging. And they doubled down on their marketing.”
“They purchased more reprints from the Journal of Medicine, where the original trial was published, because their aim was that every single doctor in the United States… which should have a copy of that so-called peer-reviewed journal article in Jung Journal Medicine so they could prescribe Vioxx.”
“Now, when I give lectures and I explain this to people, I ask people from the audience, and they’re shocked, like, how would he describe this behavior? And people come up with all sorts of things—evil, murderer. But the actual definitive or the best diagnosis to describe this behavior by these companies, which isn’t my opinion, although I agree with it, it comes from Robert Hare, forensic classification of psychopathy.”
“And he says big corporations, in the way that they conduct their business, they’re pathologically self-interested, actually fulfill all the criteria for psychopath as entities. So that means incapacity to experience guilt, repeated lying, conning others for profit. You know, there are so many criteria that they fulfill.”
