To kill or to cure: media faces a new dilemma over medical misinformation

A PHARMACEUTICAL company comes up with a new treatment. Puts it on the market. Doctors prescribe it. It becomes hugely popular. It earns enormous amounts of money for its manufacturers.

Then lethal side effects surface and it emerges that the drug company knew about them. It was aware, for a while, that hundreds of people have become very ill as a result of taking the tablets, and a fair few have actually popped their clogs. But the drug company has convinced itself that these are but anomalies, and so does not feel an overwhelming need to tell the regulators or stick one of those off-putting health warnings on each package. They keep it a secret. Their share price stays buoyant.

Eventually, of course, it stops being a secret. When this happens, as it has, more than once in recent days, the drug company gets smacked around by the FDA and other authorities, gets class action lawsuits in droves, gets fined, gets more column inches of godawful coverage than it could ever have imagined, pays out millions if not billions in damages, and is likely to take a hit on its share value.