Pfizer’s bad weekend started Saturday morning at seven a.m. when the phone rang at the home of Pfizer research chief John LaMattina in the Connecticut seaside town of Stonington. Dr. LaMattina says he was taking a shower and feared an early call might mean something was wrong with one of his kids. Wrapped in a towel and dripping wet, he walked from the bathroom to his home office to pick up the phone.

Steven Ryder, a Pfizer executive in charge of development for torcetrapib, delivered the bad news. The magnitude of the excess deaths among patients had triggered a recommendation to halt clinical testing.

Dr. LaMattina couldn’t believe it. “My first reaction was ‘huh?’ ” he said. “I was stunned and had to sit down.” He said no one had expected the drug to be cancelled.

More generally, a libertarian might argue for the abolishment of the FDA, replacing it with privatized research and side-effect prediction markets.

I agree with you, but you won’t be able to make the claim that the FDA has always been a controversy-free agency. It has made mistakes, in the past, it seems —the mistakes were corrected, later on. That said, it’s a quality organization, overall.