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Introduction
The financial goal of most, if not all, businesses is to make a profit. Indeed, our society often equates profit with business success. When a business firm is described as highly successful, it usually means the company makes a lot of profit.
Although a successful business must be a profitable one, the corporate behavior of maximizing profit at the expense of ethics and social responsibility is highly objectionable and should be discouraged. The Vioxx recall case is a perfect example. The objectives of this paper are twofold:
to provide a concise report on the Vioxx recall case; and
to offer some relevant comments.
The Vioxx recall case
On September 30, 2004, Merck & Co., Inc. announced a voluntary worldwide withdrawal of Vioxx, a drug that treats arthritis and acute pain. Vioxx has been consumed by approximately 20 million Americans since it was introduced into the marketplace in 1999; its 2003 global sales totaled $2.5 billion. The withdrawal was prompted by a new, three-year study which indicated that (in Merck's own words):
[...] there was an increased relative risk for confirmed cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, beginning after 18 months of treatment in the patients taking Vioxx compared to those taking placebo ([8] Merck & Co., Inc., 2004).
Merck has been criticized for being slow to acknowledge the health risk linked to the consumption of Vioxx. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a warning letter to Merck's CEO Raymond Gilmartin on September 17, 2001. According to The Wall Street Journal , published on October 5, 2004:
In the eight-page letter, the FDA says Merck engaged "in a promotional campaign for Vioxx that minimizes the potentially serious cardiovascular findings that were observed" in a clinical trial comparing Vioxx to naproxen, a less-expensive painkiller. "Your promotional campaign discounts the fact" that in the trial, "patients on Vioxx were observed to have a four to five-fold increase" in heart attacks, compared with patients on naproxen, the letter said ([6] Martinez, 2004).
In the December 30, 2004 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine , Dr Eric Topol, the Cleveland Clinic's Chief Cardiologist, pointed out that four-year old data from two Merck-supported research studies showed "an excess of the cardinal cardiovascular end point...