7 people since 2000? That's a very small number. Our society seems to have lost any sense of the concept of risk. Every medical procedure has risk, and this sounds like a very low risk.
I'm curious how many people in total have used the pill.
The problem with the media is that it provides no context, and most people don't seem to be capable of asking the right questions in order to obtain context.
The most logical question is, as you said, how may people used the pill during the period that 7 people died using it. That would give us a good sense of the risk, since it would be expressed in terms of percentage, not raw numbers, which are meaningless without context.
It is so easy to distort things when you don't provide context.
Actually, I think we both missed the "1 in 100,000 uses" statistic that was contained later in the article. That would indicate that there would have been roughly 700,000 uses of the pill in total.
