Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
May 31, 2005
The following quote is from an article from the May 24th edition of The New York Times, describing how one of the largest medical device manufacturers, Guidant (valued at $25,000,000,000), deliberately concealed defects in implantable heart pacemakers that killed one young man, and likely other victims.Dr. William H. Maisel, who has studied how doctors respond to device alerts, said that companies considering an alert face competing concerns over the cost of replacement versus harm to their reputations. As a result, Dr. Maisel, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said there was the potential for a "huge conflict of interest." Now, think about this for a minute. If one of us sold a car, for instance, that we knew to have bad brakes or other potentially fatal defects, do we think that the prosecutor would describe our actions as resulting from "a huge conflict of interest"? We should be so lucky.
Likely we would be charged with man slaughter as a minimum, and considering the depraved indifference toward human life involved, as well as the profit angle, we could face Murder One, the big needle. Certainly if I was in the jury on such a case, I would vote to convict, though I would be against the death penalty in such a case.
So why is it that a giant company can deliberately sell defective equipment that they reasonably know will lead to multiple deaths? Deaths that could have been avoided by a simple recall and replacement of the device with a non-defective one.
Of course there is only one logical reason, they have paid for the right to commit murder with impunity. If this were an isolated case it would be alarming and sad. However, stories of health care corporations making the decision to kill for profit are coming along at a steady pace. This is in spite of the tremendous investment made by these companies in covering up their crimes, including "contributions" to industry-friendly politicians who see to it that they seldom get caught and, when they do get caught, get away with their crimes.
Mass murder of US citizens is a huge, and hugely profitable business. Mother Jones featured an article in their May/June issue ("The Side Effects of Truth") that lays out how Merck Pharmaceuticals, one the largest "health care corporations" in the world, apparently deliberately foisted Vioxx on the world and thereby creating an estimated 50,000 needless deaths (the medicine is in no way life-saving) and, of course, reaped enormous profits.
If and when we are able to have a real government, with real efforts to protect the public from mass murdering criminals, one of the first orders of business will need to be bringing these mass-murdering sociopathic corporate executives to justice. Even I might waver in my opposition to the death penalty in these cases.
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So why is it that a giant company can deliberately sell defective equipment that they reasonably know will lead to multiple deaths?
Deaths that could have been avoided by a simple recall and replacement of the device with a non-defective one.
Of course there is only one logical reason, they have paid for the right to commit murder with impunity.
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© by the author.
What do you think?
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