Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13702
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
Howard L.
Merck settles complaints over Vioxx ads: Connecticut to get $1.35 million from N.J. drug maker
theday.com 2008 May 21
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=d7a3d4ec-33dd-49e5-8695-2bb2e501dab2
Full text:
Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has agreed to pay Connecticut $1.35 million for deceptive marketing of its former drug Vioxx and has agreed to federal oversight of television advertising for all its medications, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced Tuesday.
The payout to Connecticut is part of a $58 million settlement to be divided among 29 states and the District of Columbia.
”Merck’s overly aggressive early ad campaign for Vioxx misled doctors and consumers, prompting heavy use before deadly side effects emerged,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “As a result, hundreds of thousands of consumers rushed to the drug before its dangers were fully understood, leaving them at increased risk of heart attack and stroke.”
”Aggressive marketing techniques, combined with deceptive use of scientific data, are not in patients’ best interests,” added Jerry Farrell Jr., the state’s consumer protection commissioner.
The agreement comes about six months after New Jersey-based Merck settled as many as 47,000 Vioxx lawsuits nationwide for $4.85 billion. Merck had set aside about $55 million in anticipation of Tuesday’s settlement with states that had charged the company with violation of consumer-protection laws.
A painkiller, Vioxx generated billions of dollars in sales during a five-year period between 1999 and 2004, before it had to be pulled from the market.
Merck is one of several major drug companies to come under scrutiny in recent months for so-called direct-to-consumer advertising. Pfizer Inc., which has its global research-and-development headquarters in New London, decided in February to cancel a long-running advertising campaign involving artificial-heart pioneer Dr. Robert Jarvik after critics pointed out that Jarvik is not a cardiologist and doesn’t have a license to practice medicine.
The federal Government Accountability Office reported two years ago that annual spending on direct-to-consumer advertising, often presented in the form of television spots touting certain drugs, had grown from $1.1 billion in 1997 to $4.2 billion in 2006. A study last month in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that physicians in the United States and Canada had dramatically different patterns of prescribing drugs and blamed direct-to-consumer advertising for the discrepancies, according to an article in Psychiatric News published this month.
The agreement between Merck and various states requires the company, over the next 10 years, to delay direct-to-consumer television advertising for pain medicines if required to do so by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It also requires Merck, over the next seven years, to submit all TV ads to the FDA for review before airing them and to modify the spots as directed.
The agreement also calls on Merck to accurately represent clinical research in all future communications to the public and to doctors, prohibits ghost writing of medical journals or studies, requires disclosures about speakers’ conflicts of interest and ties to the company and monitors conflicts of interest on boards that mine data-safety information.
