Drug maker, Merck & Co., has always characterized its conduct as above board and ethically appropriate among pharmaceutical companies.
“We employ rigorous scientific methods to design, conduct, analyze, and report results of clinical trials in the development of innovative drugs and vaccines, with a focus on meeting unmet medical needs and with an ethic that puts the interests of the patient first.”
That’s what the company says in a 2002 paper titled “ The practices of Merck & Co.
But what really goes on is another story.
Authors writing in this week’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reveal how Merck manipulated dozens of publications to promote one of its products, ironically the painkiller Vioxx (rofecoxib).
Based on internal company documents revealed in Vioxx litigation, JAMA authors uncover how the company, without disclosing it, compensated ghostwriters who aren’t even doctors, to create articles for professional journals that have the potential to influence doctors and popularize drugs prescribed to the public.
In the 250 documents reviewed by the authors, Merck employees either working by themselves or in collaboration with a medical publishing company helped create the study on Vioxx.
They would then recruit academics or leaders in the medical field to lend their name as the lead author.
For scientific review papers, Merck would outline the plan for the manuscript then ghostwriters were hired from medical publishing companies, which typically pay about $20,000 per submission to the ghostwriter.
The scientist then recruited to be the named author would be offered “honoraria” for their participation.
This review in JAMA finds that among 96 published articles, 92 percent of clinical trials disclosed Merck’s financial support. But only half disclosed Merck’s involvement in the creation of the publication or whether the author had received compensation.
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