corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12516

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Schering-Plough and Merck defend Vytorin
The Star-Ledger 2008 Jan 20
http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2008/01/scheringplough_and_merck_defen.html


Full text:

Schering-Plough and Merck defended their two cholesterol drugs Vytorin and Zetia in newspaper advertisements after a disappointing study generated negative publicity, Reuters reported today.

A full-page ad in The New York Times on Sunday said consumers using Vytorin and Zetia “may be worried about recent news stories questioning the benefit of these medicines…on the basis of a single study that has generated a lot of confusion.”

Similar ads appeared in the Star-Ledger and the Wall Street Journal.

The ad cites the drugs’ ability to lower “bad” cholesterol and urges patients to follow their doctors’ recommendations on taking prescribed medicines.

The two New Jersey-based drugmakers released results on Monday showing that Vytorin failed its primary goal of preventing fatty plaque buildup in carotid arteries more effectively than widely used generic cholesterol fighters. The results led some cardiologists to question Vytorin’s value.

Vytorin, which is the product of a partnership between Schering-Plough and Merck, combines Zetia and Zocor into one pill. The study did show that Vytorin did cut levels of “bad” cholesterol more than Zocor alone.

“All of us at Merck and Schering-Plough proudly stand behind the established efficacy and safety profiles of Zetia and Vytorin,” the ad says.

Under the main text of the ad appears the names of top medical officers at the companies.

“We plan to continue this campaign to provide appropriate balance and perspective to patients and, if they believe they have the need, to encourage them to talk to their doctors about their treatment,” Schering-Plough spokesman Lee Davies said in an e-mail.

Vytorin and Zetia have combined annual sales of about $5 billion. Last week shares of Schering-Plough fell about 23 percent and shares of Merck were down about 12 percent.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909