Raulken co.UK - Merck Vioxx Trial Done to Boost Sales, Not Science, Study Says

By Elizabeth Lopatto and Michelle Fay Cortez Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Merck & Co.'s marketing department devised a study on the painkiller Vioxx to convince 600 doctors involved in the trial to prescribe the drug and recommend it to their peers,...

A study of Merck’s painkiller Vioxx may have been published in a reputable medical journal, but it was designed as a marketing tool, not a scientific investigation. That’s the argument put forward in a paper published today — in Annals of Internal Medicine, the same journal that published the study in the first place. Nonsense, says Merck, the trial was good science designed to answer meaningful questions. The study, known as Advantage, was “designed and executed in the spirit of the Merck marketing principles,” according to a Merck memo (online here) which came to light in a Vioxx lawsuit and is cited in today’s article. The objectives were to enable a group of key doctors to try the product ahead of its launch, priming the market and also gathering data important to the doctors. The trial compared Vioxx against naproxen, another painkiller, and was published in 2003. Today’s analysis is by several academic physicians who were paid by plaintiffs attorneys in the Vioxx litigation. (These are the same authors who recently accused Merck of hiring ghostwriters for some Vioxx studies.) Jonathan Edelman, a senior official at Merck Research Laboratories, said the company did the study to answer important medical questions. “This is a trial that had good, scientific merit and was judged by the editors of the Annals when they accepted it for publication,” he told the Health...
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