In 1999, Merck appointed rheumatologist Michael Weinblatt of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston to head the safety panel for the Vioxx VIGOR study.
When he became chair of the safety panel, Weinblatt and his wife owned $73,000 of Merck stock.
David Bjorkman, now dean of the University of Utah School of Medicine, also served on the five-member safety panel.
In 1999, he participated in the Merck speakers bureau and gave presentations in the summer of that year.
In addition, the panel meetings had a Merck employee present. The employee attended all the panel's meetings -- including its private deliberations. She even wrote the meetings' minutes.
At its last meeting, in December 1999, when the safety panel decided the heart problems weren't serious enough to stop the study, it also said that the problems merited analysis. The panel asked Merck to do that as soon as possible.
Merck sent back word that it wanted to wait.
When the safety panel's chairman Michael Weinblatt insisted, Merck proposed a plan.
The company would analyze heart problems it was told about by a "cutoff" date -- one month before the study ended.
Weinblatt agreed.
As a result of that cut-off date, three of the 20 heart attacks among Vioxx patients weren't included when Merck wrote up the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
And, Vioxx looked safer than it really was.
Soon after agreeing to Merck's plan, Weinblatt signed a new consulting contract to sit on a Merck advisory board. Merck agreed to pay him $5,000 a day for 12 days over a two-year period.
Weinblatt received an initial check for $15,000 a few weeks later.
Research published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that between 1999 and 2004, when Vioxx was withdrawn from the market, 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking the drug, and 38,000 of them died.
Source: npr.org
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