Denialism by Michael Specter

He called it “Vioxx Vanished.” The Times had a better idea: “Good Riddance to a Bad Drug.” Noting that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes, Topol wrote that “our two most common deadly diseases should not be caused by a drug.” He also published a column in the New England Journal of Medicine , called “Failing the Public Health”: “The senior executives at Merck and the leadership at the FDA,” he wrote, “share responsibility for not having taken appropriate action and not recognizing that they are accountable for the public health.”
    On December 3, 2005, in a videotaped deposition presented under subpeona at one of the many trials following the recall, Topol argued that Vioxx posed an “extraordinary risk.” A colleague from the Cleveland Clinic, Richard Rudick, told him that Gilmartin, the Merck CEO, had become infuriated by Topol’s public attacks and had complained bitterly to the clinic’s board about the articles in the Times and the New England Journal of Medicine . “What has Merck ever done to the clinic to warrant this?” Gilmartin asked.
    Two days after that testimony, Topol received an early call telling him not to attend an 8 a.m. meeting of the board of governors. “My position—chief academic officer—had been abolished. I was also removed as provost of the medical school I founded.” The clinic released a statement saying that there was no connection between Topol’s Vioxx testimony and his sudden demotion, after fifteen years, from one of medicine’s most prominent positions. A spokeswoman for the clinic called it a simple reorganization. The timing, she assured reporters, was a coincidence.

    DID THE RECALL of Vioxx, or any other single event, cause millions of Americans to question the value of science as reflexively as they had once embraced it? Of course not. Over the decades, as our knowledge of the physical world has grown, we have also endured the steady drip of doubt—about both the definition of progress and whether the pursuit of science will always drive us in the direction we want to go. A market disaster like Vioxx, whether through malice, greed, or simply error, presented denialists with a rare opportunity: their claims of conspiracy actually came true. More than that, in pursuit of profits, it seemed as if a much-admired corporation had completely ignored the interests of its customers.
    It is also true, however, that spectacular technology can backfire spectacularly—and science doesn’t always live up to its expectations. When we see something fail that we had assumed would work, whether it’s a “miracle” drug or a powerful machine, we respond with fear and anger. People often point to the atomic bomb as the most telling evidence of that phenomenon. That’s not entirely fair: however much we may regret it, the bomb did what it was invented to do.
    That wasn’t the case in 1984, when a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, released forty-two tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas into the atmosphere, exposing more than half a million people to deadly fumes. The immediate death toll was 2,259; within two weeks that number grew to more than eight thousand. Nor was it true two years later, when an explosion at Unit 4 of the V. I. Lenin Atomic Power Station transformed a place called Chernobyl into a synonym for technological disaster. They were the worst industrial accidents in history—one inflicting immense casualties and the other a worldwide sense of dread. The message was hard to misinterpret: “Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them,” wrote Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, in his essay “Industrial Society and Its Future”—the Unabomber Manifesto. “Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our