Category: Rants

It certainly didn’t take long for lawyers to jump on Vioxx. Just a couple of days after Merck announced they were pulling it, I saw TV commercials from local legal firms urging people who’d been taking it to contact them. With Vioxx as a warm-up, I’m sure it will take even less time for them to jump on Pfizer and Celebrex.

It kind of strikes me as ironic that just a few years ago there was much hubbub about the FDA‘s lengthy drug approval process and how it was keeping potentially life-saving/altering drugs out of the hands of people who could benefit from them. These drugs can help peeople. These drugs can save peoples’ lives. Why isn’t the FDA approving them for clinical use? What’s taking them so long? The FDA bureaucracy must be overhauled so that these wonderdrugs can be approved faster. Speed up the process!

So the FDA did streamline their drug approval process so that drugs would be approved for clinical use faster.

Now all the commotion is about how the FDA didn’t spend enough time studying the effects of things like the COX-2 inhibitor class drugs. They’re releasing drugs too soon. They shouldn’t have approved these drugs before knowing the long term effects. Why didn’t they study them longer?

Either way, the FDA is stuck between a rock and a hard place and someone at the FDA’s CDER gets screwed. Drug companies and potential drug beneficiaries (the patients) clamour for the newest drugs to be released expediently. To do that you shorten the time the drugs are studied and evaluated. That means fewer long-term studies. But then if a long-term adverse effect is discovered, the FDA gets blasted for not studying the drug long enough and rushing drugs to market before knowing the long-term effects.

People seem to forget (or conveniently ignore) the fact that for every drug that does get approved, there are several more that are blocked because adverse effects were found or failed to show as much of an effect as expected.
So how do people want it, over easy or fried hard?

Man, those comment spammers are relentless. All month I’ve been logging 404 errors from comment spammers with spammy referrer URLs trying to hit my MT installation. If they were actually hitting the scripts (a few are), I might be really annoyed. But the fact that they’re all going to a bad URL and just getting 404 pages only has me mildly annoyed at the moment. What’s more puzzling is that none of the spammy referrer URLs are even real. So what are these guys tring to point people to? And if they keep getting 404 errors, why do they keep trying? These guys are either incredibly stupid or their spambots are incredibly stupid. Or more likely both.

The parkade I’m assigned to at work has 3 entrances, but only two lanes leading up to them.

The left lane goes to the middle entrance, and the right lane goes to the right entrance leaving the left entrance laneless. Invariably at the busy times there are cars lined up in the two lanes in front of two of the entrances, but for some reason nobody ever uses the third entrance to the left. Every now and then someone (like me) will turn off and use it, but for the most part that third entrance goes unused. It’s very odd. People here are always in such a rush once they get into their cars, but sit patiently in front of the parkade entrance waiting their turn and ignoring that third entrance.

Now there’s a bunch of construction going on for the new hospital next to the parkade, and one of the lanes is blocked off leaving just the lane going to the middle entrance.

Do you know what they do now?

They all line up in front of the middle entrance and leave the two side entrances unused.

I don’t know if I should yell or laugh at them for their stupidity.

Hey lady, yakking on your cell phone cruising down the highway is bad enough. Next time you might also want to make sure there isn’t anyone next to you when you decide to change lanes.

It’s a good thing at least one person was paying attention to what’s going on around them.