This whole business smacks of politically correct junk science. One guy dies, he happens to be on the flavor-of-the-day cox inhibitor, and they take the stuff off the market, penalizing the patients who need it and the investors who hold Merck, Pfizer, etc., stock (and create more money making opportunites for the trial lawyer leeches).
The naproxen find today was strictly seredipity--while reviewing the Vioxx, Celebrex debacle.
What it really smells of is Drug War. Oxycontin is now "hillbilly heroin." Better for the serfs to die than for anyone to get high.
With Vioxx lot of people died and the reason they yanked it was the documents are out there showing they knew about it from the beginning. There were approxiamately 180,000 heart attacks while taking the drug. The rate of heart attack was 2 to nearly 4 times higher than the people not taking it. You do the math. Even if those numbers are off by an order of magnitude it is EVIL.
I know I couldn't make the decision to hide that kind of thing. You obviously could. I don't envy you. These people stuck their company's wallet in a noose. Unfortunately the people who made the callous decisions cannot be jailed or sued personally so the investors will have to pay. Hopefully the payment will be high enough that these slugs lose their jobs and ethical responsible people are put in stopping this kind of behavior in the future.
The really horrible thing is they could have been honest about the potential side effects in a subset of their market and limited distribution and prescription length and a remarkably effective drug would still be on the market making them money. But hey they chose to market it to everyone like SSRIs and statins.
I hope in the afterlife they reap what they sowed.