Ron Unz - Chinese Melamine or American Vioxx: Half a million dead and no questions asked
April 23, 2012 In contrasting China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths, together with the tremendous importance which our society places upon individual American lives. For us, a single wrongful death can sometimes provoke weeks of massive media coverage and galvanize the nation into corrective action, while life remains cheap in China, a far poorer land of over a billion people, ruled by a ruthless Communist Party eager to bury its mistakes. But an examination of two of the greatest public-health scandals of the last few years casts serious doubt on this widespread belief.
What follows is an extraordinary report by Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative, part of his larger feature just published by the TAC, “China’s Rise, America’s Fall. “ Ron makes the charge that perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility.
Ron writes to us : “I remember back in 2005, I was reading my morning newspapers, as I always do, and noticed those tiny, buried items about the unprecedented drop in the American death rate. Hmm I said, I wonder if that might have anything to do with all those other stories about that deadly drug recently taken off the market and all the resulting lawsuits. I never got around to looking into it, and apparently nobody in the media did either.
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