Merck’s Bad Penny Has Returned
In 2004 the Merck drug company was taken to court for
the class action suit against the drug Vioxx, which was
linked to heart attacks. Merck had to pay
4.85 billion dollars for the settlement.
Unknown to Merck, the Vioxx settlement was not the
end of the drug scandal. Dr. Joseph Ross of the
New York Mount Sinai School of Medicine was alerted
to various other unethical processes involving
drug companies.
Dr Ross has reported that Merck and other drug
companies actually pay money to medical doctors to
place their names on drug companies reports. The drug
companies pay outside medical writers to draft the
reports and then have the doctors sign their names to
the report for a price. No one is saying what price is
needed to get the doctors to sign.
Merck did admit that they do hire so called ghost
writers to draft the reports, but couldn’t see what
harm was done if someone else wrote the report as
long as it is what the doctors claimed.
After more pressure, the drug lawyers went as far
as to state that the report reflect the “opinions” of
the doctors whose name appear on the reports.
Are the lawyers saying that an “opinion” is the same
as having done the actual research which lead to the
end results? The main question is whether the doctors
were involved in the actual testing of the drugs, not
what opinion they have of the drugs.
Everyone has an opinion, but the research and drug
testing are suppose to be based on actual “facts”.
Doctors aren’t saying much about the situation.
Tags: Drug advertisement, drug companies profits, drug company advertisements, health, health care