 Biddle (2007) discusses epistemological and moral issues of drug approval in the context of a case study on Vioxx, an analgesic. Vioxx was approved by the FDA in 1999 but five years later pulled from the market by its manufacturer Merck due to safety concerns. It is estimated that some 55,000 people died from taking the drug (Harris 2005). Biddle observes that the FDA is not sufficiently independent of the pharmaceutical industry to make unbiased decisions likely. Many of the members of the FDA’s drug approval committees have financial conflicts of interests (often in the form of receiving benefits from the pharmaceutical company whose drug is to be approved), and a large number of employees of the FDA are dependent on the “user fees” industry pays to help cover the cost of drug approval. To solve these problems of conflicts of interests, Biddle proposes to institute an adversarial system in which two groups of advocates, a group of representatives of the manufacturer and a group of independent scientists, would argue before a panel of judges over whether a drug should be allowed on the market. The panel of judges in this model also consists of independent FDA or university scientists. He argues that the adversarial system would better acknowledge the fact that an increasing number of medical researchers have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry by treating them as advocates rather than disinterested experts. (See also Reiss and Wieten 2015, Reiss forthcoming-b.)