Why did the
BMJ fail to disclose its partnership agreement with Merck, major vaccine
manufacturer--13 vaccines, including the controversial MMR vaccine ?
Is it just conceivably possible, that the BMJ's
decision to commission and publish Brian Deer's series of articles
attacking Dr. Andrew Wakefield's personal and scientific integrity--and
lend its unwavering editorial endorsement--without giving him an
opportunity to defend himself--might be influenced by a SIGNIFICANT
financial conflict of interest?
The discovery that a psychiatry textbook penned
by two influential academics who gained notoriety, was actually
ghostwritten shocked
Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the FDA, who called it "a
new level of chutzpah [that] takes your breath away."
How about the discovery that in 2008, the
pharmaceutical giant, Merck--using its tradename, MSD signed a
partnership agreement with the BMJ Group that effectively gave the
company control of 350 interactive continuing medical education courses
in over 20 medical therapy areas?
"This unique partnership will change the face of medical
education in Europe and beyond, allowing users access to most of
BMJ Learning's library of 'Continuing Medical Education' (CME) and
'Continuing Professional Development' (CPD) content. The agreement
between MSD and BMJ Group comprises about 350 interactive learning
courses in over 20 medical therapy areas."
Why did the BMJ
fail to disclose its partnership agreement with Merck?
Why did the BMJ conceal from readers-- of
the Brian Deer series of articles and the BMJ editorial excoriating Dr.
Andrew Wakefield, charging him with deliberate fraud and financial
conflict of interest-- the fact that the BMJ had a partnership with
Merck, a major manufacturer of vaccines--including the MMR vaccine,
which is at the center of the Wakefield controversy?
In 2009,
Univadis, a Merck trademark, entered into a partnership with The
Lancet providing "medical education and an information
website."
"Through a unique global medical literature service called Just
Published, clinical specialists registered on Univadis
®will receive free access to the full text of recently
published articles from The Lancet. This new service will be
available on
www.univadis.com
I don't think it a stretch to suggest--as for
Martin Walker does (below) that:
"Linking Univadis ® /Merck with the BMJ and The Lancet
inevitably links them both to Merck's VIS (Vaccine Information
Service) online — 'a comprehensive source of information,
especially designed to provide healthcare professionals with the
answers to their questions on vaccines.'"
The fact that BMJ and The Lancet--
two of the most prestigious international medical journals would enter
into a medical education partnership with the drug manufacturer whose
staff drew up a
"doctor hit list" to intimidate doctors who dared to discuss the
lethal cardiac risks linked to Vioxx--is in itself a betrayal of trust
of the worst sort.
The stated purpose of the Merck / BMJ/ Lancet
partnerships that remained hidden from readers' view, is to "change the
face of medical education in Europe and beyond."
The BMJ editorial accompanying Deer's articles, did its best
to lend authority to the vaccine industry (Merck's) perspective. In an
introductory sound bite the editors declare:
"Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door
on this damaging vaccine scare."
Finally, the
Statement about Competing Interests at the end of the BMJ Editorial
claims compliance with conflict of interest disclosure requirements of
the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. But the BMJ
editor in chief and two deputy editors conceal rather than disclose the
most relevant financial conflict of interest:
"Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified
Competing Interest form at
www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the
corresponding author) and declare: no support from any organisation
for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any
organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in
the previous three years
Posted by Vera Hassner Sharav
Merck Vaccines for Children: :
AFLURIA® (Influenza Virus
Vaccine)
COMVAX® [Haemophilus b Conjugate
(Meningococcal Protein Conjugate) and Hepatitis B (Recombinant)
Vaccine]
GARDASIL® [Human Papillomavirus
Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16, and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant]
M-M-R®II (Measles,
Mumps, and Rubella Virus Vaccine Live)
PedvaxHIB® [Haemophilus b
Conjugate Vaccine (Meningococcal Protein Conjugate)]
PNEUMOVAX®23 (Pneumococcal
Vaccine Polyvalent)
ProQuad® (Measles, Mumps,
Rubella, and Varicella Virus Vaccine Live)
RECOMBIVAX HB® [Hepatitis B
Vaccine (Recombinant)]
RotaTeq® (Rotavirus Vaccine,
Live, Oral, Pentavalent)
Tetanus and Diphtheria Toxoids Adsorbed
VAQTA® (Hepatitis A Vaccine,
Inactivated)
VARIVAX® (Varicella Virus
Vaccine Live)
ZOSTAVAX® (Zoster Vaccine Live)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Merck's Medical Media Empire
Martin J Walker
Today the world is so big and the miasma of information about it
so opaque that even
experts have to be constantly in touch 24/7, as they say. Take your
eye of the ball for
a second and you might regret it for a life-time. Some information,
however, slips
through the fog almost unnoticed; who, for instance, remembers
reading 'MSD signs
partnership with BMJ group' in June 2008, or two years later, 'Univadis
and the
Lancet announce new partnership'. Anyway only a small number of
people would
have read beyond the headline, bothering to work out who MSD was and
what was
Univadis.
Anyone who did get further than the headline might have been
shocked, for
MSD is of course Merck Sharp and Dohme, the massive drug company
known as
Merck. And Univadis®? Yes, you've guessed they're also an aspect of
Merck. Merck
is one of the manufacturers of MMR II and was one of the defendants
in the claim
brought by UK parents against three vaccine manufacturers. In fact
Merck, having
taken over Aventis Pasteur, which company had previously partnered
them in
marketing MMR II in the UK, now constitutes two of the defendant
companies in that
presently defunct court case.
What does Univadis®, that part of MSD involved in both partnerships
do? Like
many multinationals the ever developing Merck is gradually building
an empire that
will not have to rely upon PR and information agencies outside it's
own corporation.
Univadis® (Univadis® is a registered trademark of Merck & Co., Inc.,
Whitehouse
Station, New Jersey, USA) is the company within a company that sets
out to educate
doctors globally in the Merck scriptures. Merck describes the
Univadis® web site as
'a non promotional medical website of MSD pharmaceuticals, providing
information
and interests to UK doctors.' It has developed educational
programmes in both the
developing and developed world that in partnership with journals and
other media
organisation can give the world the Merck word. Not a word you
notice about
influencing the content of the BMJ or the Lancet or any kind of
reciprocal
arrangement that will see BMJ or Lancet articles twice round the
world in
milliseconds.
When Brian Deer recently wrote his three slanderous articles about
Dr
Andrew Wakefield in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the common
opinion was
that the BMJ was in hoc to Big Pharma — so what did one expect. It
was hard to fault
this opinion even without any exact detail, after all it had been
thought for some time
that Deer was in league with either GSK or MSD - especially during
his time
attending the the US cases - and with the Lancet policy having been
steered for a
period by a Managing Director of Elsevier who was also a
non-executive board
member of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK); and with Dr Richard Horton, the
Lancet's editor,
an enthusiastic Fellow of the drug front Academy of Medical
Sciences, funded in part
by MSD and GSK, and BMJ conferences supported by both GSK and MSD,
it had
become an oxymoron to talk of 'independent' medical journals.
Linking Univadis®/Merck with the BMJ and the Lancet inevitably links
them
both to Merck's VIS (Vaccine Information Service) online — 'a
comprehensive
source of information, especially designed to provide healthcare
professionals with
the answers to their questions on vaccines' — and Media Medics a
group of slatternly
men and women, who long ago sold their souls for the bright lights.
Media Medics has been appointed to provide new content for the
Univadis®
site, and each month we will be supplying four articles on topical
subjects,
together with regular input to the related discussion forums. The
articles are
opinionated (as well as factually accurate!) and comment is
encouraged. We are
now looking for potential contributors ...
In this plethora of manipulated global information and somewhere in
the tangle of
vested interests we find a rough ball park vision of the involvement
of Deer with the
vaccine industry, it's still not 'smoking-gun' clear but it begins
to form a focusing
picture of Deer's involvement in the BMJ assaults on Dr Wakefield.
When the BMJ
signed up with univadis® Merck's global Medical Director, Dr
Ottfried Zierenberg
said:
Our collaboration with BMJ Group intends to ultimately increase the
health
outcome for patients, and strengthen the position of univadis® as a
trusted,
professional and comprehensive source (of articles and information)
for the
medical community.
It was still a matter of controversy only a few years ago when
medical journals or
their staff were found to be supported, linked or conjoined with
pharmaceutical
companies, today the battles are over, and the dead truth lies
scattered on various
battlefields, the bodies looted of their ethics. In the UK, both the
Lancet and the BMJ
are evidently deeply compromised. But is anyone going to take any
notice? Probably
not, ethics has become a foreign language in the UK.
MSD have had plenty of experience in crawling out from under
responsibility,
especially after their Rotavirus was heavily criticised for creating
a potentially fatal
bowel condition. To polish up their image following that farrago,
the company
employed the infamous crisis PR company APCO Worldwide based in Hong
Kong, to
design and execute a communication strategy that would solve the
problem.
APCO, working closely with the client, took what was a complex
situation
involving unfamiliar medical terms and simplified the information
into defined
key messages. APCO then devised and executed a proactive media
campaign to
communicate these messages throughout Hong Kong. Central to the
campaign
was a media briefing, organized by APCO, which was attended by
almost all
print, broadcast and online media, where two leading pediatricians
presented the
facts, contextualized the announcements and answered questions from
the press.
The briefing was used to highlight a separate report issued by the
U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in response to the FDA’s
announcement,
which concluded that the vaccine did not increase the chance of
intussusception
in babies.
The APCO campaign, they say, solved the situation entirely, proving
to the world that
no one was damaged by MSDs Rotavirus, in fact, it appeared it was
another
companies product that was responsible!
APCO’s media campaign generated widespread, positive coverage of
MSD’s
key messages. As a result, public confidence in the vaccine was
swiftly
restored.
Despite the sterling work of APCO on the Rotavirus case, it seems
that Merck feel the
need to build a proactive media empire, with embedded medical
journals, that can
dissapear the tragedy of damaged children and snow-out their legal
responsibilities.
~~~~~~
Mr. Walker's website,
,
http://www.slingshotpublications.com provides extensive
analysis about the vituperous Wakefield-Deer controversy. |