Pharmaceutical companies have used dubious means to get their products to market for decades. Whether it be an onslaught of advertisements showing happy people in a park or a guy smiling at his wife, paying off members of Congress, having their top-level employees work at the FDA or throwing gobs of money at universities to do biased research, there are many means for Big Pharma to make astronomical profits. Even with all that, Merck has redefined deception with their latest tactic to convince people their products are safe and effective.
From Attorney at Law:
Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical Goliath behind Vioxx, Gardasil, and other big-name drugs, allegedly paid the medical publishing firm Elsevier to crank out a make-believe medical journal that was nothing more than a marketing tool designed to promote the company’s products under the guise of legitimate medical research.
The journal, called Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, was used to publish favorable research and data on Merck drugs. Merck then quoted the fictitious research in promoting its drugs as being safe. But the purported journal cannot be found on the Internet and it’s not registered with Medline, the medical journal database, leading some to call the publication a scam.
Despite the good things companies like Merck develops, every drug manufactured is tainted by methods such as creating fictitious medical journals...and all other means of deception. It is a real shame that there are pharmacists out there that want to help people, but the people that control the budget (along with some of the doctors) ruin the industry with their greed and avarice. Putting profits ahead of people, especially in the context of health care is extremely dangerous to say the least.
Now that Congress is gearing up to tackle health care reform, legislators might want to pay attention to stories like this, and ignore Merck's (and Pfizer, Amgen, etc etc) lobbyists. When we look at the facts of what goes on, both in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, only then can something be done about the problems we face.
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