Well we knew it was the case all along but this week there are emails released as part of Vioxx litigation in Australia against the drug company Merck related to Vioxx induced heart attacks, that show that Merck drew up a “hit list” of doctors in academia whose opinions about Vioxx were negative in order to “neutralise” or “discredit” them (their words, not mine). One of the emails stated:
We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.
You can’t make this stuff up. In other words, use influence and intimidation to block their promotion, remove their research funding, or threaten their universities with such tactics. Some doctors get death threats and letters are sent to their deans, or their deans get phone calls. Merck managed to silence Eric Topol, MD, a cardiologist who was formerly head ot the Cleveland Clinic, one of the most prestigious cardiology programs in the world. Through a convoluted series of events, a week after he testified against Merck over the Vioxx issue he was out of a job at Cleveland Clinic, and what was telling about it was that Merck used physician proxies and the accusation and inquiry process to bring it about, in conjunction with giving a 100 million dollar grant to his colleague Steven Nissen MD. Ah, the drama. There are many more stories of intimidation and attempts at career assassination regarding Vioxx, Avandia, and other drugs. Apparently these people have no conscious, or becoming part of the corporate mass removes that from them. As I have written previously, Hoffmann La Roche Pharmaceuticals didn’t like my opinion about their acne drug Accutane and depression, and went to great lengths to discredit me. They sued my university, hired the dermatologist on our study and then used her as a mole to find out what we were doing (needless to say we never got any patient referrals from her), and accused me of fraud (which led to an inquiry at my university). I remember one meeting with the dermatologists at my university where I was trying to organize a clinical trial of Accutane that was VERY uncomfortable. They were saying that it was a “good” drug for acne and why would I want to do this research? One of them said that that could hurt their ability to get research funding from Roche. Then another one said that they hadn’t had research funding from Roche for 15 years cuz they had a legal dispute with them that was unresolved. So what was the big deal? Roche btw was once voted one of the most evil corporations in the world cuz they were involved in a price fixing scheme of vitamins that resulted hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and in some of their Swiss executives having to do jail time in Texas.
One attorney who came onto the scene of my Accutane and depression story late said it was a “cautionary tale” and another one said that they did that in order to make an example, so that noone in the future would say negative things about their drugs.
So what you have is a picture where drug companies shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to key academic physician leaders to buy their good will, and those whom they can’t buy off they try to destroy.
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