Merck's Deleted Data

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Forbes article describing a drug study tampering proven by software. From the article: "A top editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says that he was stunned to find out that data linking Vioxx to cardiovascular risk was deleted from a major study his journal published five years ago--and that it appears that Merck researchers may have deleted that data ... When you hover the cursor over the editing changes, the identity of the editor pops up, and it just says 'Merck'"

Comments

Edit changes...

[Scoth]

You'd think after all the high profile cases of stuff like this happening, companies would be more careful with the revision history system. Guess not...

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Anonymous Coward]

An entire multi-national corporation brought down by Microsoft's TrackChanges feature...

Editors/Reviews are at fault as well

[karvind]

From TFA

"I was somewhere between surprised and stunned," Dr. Gregory Curfman, executive editor of The Journal, says. "They allowed us to publish an article that was just incomplete and inaccurate in some respects and was misleading and may have contributed to the detriment to the public health. " (emphasis added)

Now why would you allow to publish such inconclusive studies at all ? Is this journal peer-reviewed ? It would be interesting to see if they also publish the comments from the anonymous reviewers ? Did they agree about the paper before it got published ?

Re:Editors/Reviews are at fault as well

[GrnArmadillo]

All but one of the authors of the study were either employed by or consultants for Merck. The company decided that the article would technically be telling the truth (X patients died DURING THIS TRIAL) without mentioning the deaths that occured between the scheduled end of the trial and the publication of the paper. Short of the peer reviewers conducting their own clinical trial, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, there was no way for them to know that information had been withheld.

Re:ugh

[lbrandy]

I know this thread is going to turn into a huge gripe on massive corporations and how corrupt and evil and bad they are... but... considering the company is being publicly humilated, it's stock is trading at half the price it was a 2 years ago, and it's hemorrhaging jobs. I think it's fair to say the free market is correctly punishing this big business that is supposedly "running the world". But that's just me.

Easily Forged

[ShawnDoc]

The only problem with this is that this information is easily forged. It would be VERY EASY for someone to frame someone else this way. I'm not saying Merck didn't do it in this case. I'm just saying that even someone with no computer knowledge can change their user name in Word, make some changes, and have it appear as if someone else made the edit.

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many people had their health sacrificed to get us to this point? For that matter, what punishment is occurring to those who did the evil deeds?

Nope, the free market is doing too little to late, as always.

And, BTW - it's not the corporation that's corrupt and evil, it's the people at the top of the corporations, who are immune to the evil that they do, unless they make mistakes in covering up their deeds.

Re:ugh

[dclydew]

I doubt the economy would keep bad people from doing bad things. However, if all corporate executives were held to task for their intentional failures, we would likely see less of this sort of thing. The problem, in my opinion, isn't capitalism, it seems more like the current incarnation of capitalism that has spawned mega-corporations where the "bad people" can often hide behind the faceless 'entity'. We're doing better now than we were at the start of the 20th century, but we still have much we can improve upon, personal responsibility and liability are at the top of the list (IMO).