Pharma Ethics, My Foot!

As we have all read Pfizer has pulled its newest investigational drug torcetrapib from further trials because of side effect issues(patient deaths). This drug was touted as the replacement for Lipitor, the next new wonder drug from Pfizer drug development. Well as we have seen with many other companies ,drug studies are often a crap shoot. If a serious side effect arises during the study process, the drug can often be pulled. What does this mean to thousands of Pfizer employees and vendors that support Pfizer? It means a lot of pain. Employees will be laid off and vendors will be fired. This is a hard fact of life for the industry that is often described as capitalistic and profit driven. As this news shows not all new compounds reach approval by the FDA and there is a ton of risk and expense incurred when pharmaceutical products fail during development.