Merck Committed Scientific Fraud in Delays, Distortions of Vytorin Drug Trial (opinion)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Vytorin, Merck, clinical trials

(NewsTarget opinion) The latest round of scientific fraud from Big Pharma arrives in the form of yet more junk science conducted by Merck on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Vytorin. Results of a clinical trial involving the drug were finally released this week, nearly two years after they were known by Merck, and only after Merck attempted to manipulate the data by redefining the outcome of the trial after the fact!

To help explain the degree of scientific fraud happening with this Vytorin clinical trial, I've released a sixty-second parody video ad featuring Merck's Vytorin drug along with a narrative explanation of the fraud surrounding Vytorin. You can watch the video here: http://www.newstarget.com/022501.html

Deliberate Fraud: What Really Happened with Vytorin

Vytorin has been a top-selling cholesterol drug for several years, generating billions of dollars in revenue for Merck and Schering-Plough. Even though the drug was being prescribed to millions of people, nobody really knew if it worked to remove plaque from arteries (which sort of makes you wonder why it was approved in the first place, right?), so Merck launched a clinical trial called ENHANCE to study the effectiveness of the drug.

The ENHANCE study was completed in April, 2006, and the results were turned over to Merck. As it turns out, Merck didn't like the results of the trial, so instead of releasing them to the public (or the FDA), it sat on them, delaying the release of this data while Vytorin sales continued to ring up billions of dollars in sales.

After sitting on the data for over a year, Merck decided it would commit scientific fraud and "redefine" the goal of the study after the fact! This would involve selectively deciding which data points looked the best, and then reshaping the goal of the study to fit the data. (How's that for "evidence-based medicine?" The deeper you look into the so-called "science" behind Big Pharma's pill-pushing agenda, the more you realize it's based on nothing but fraud...)

When the scientific community got word of this after-the-fact redefinition of the study, they were outraged and demanded that Merck abide by established scientific guidelines. Merck then abandoned its plan to manipulate the goal of the study and decided to sit on the data for several more months.

Finally, after the threat of a Congressional investigation -- and spurred by numerous critics accusing Merck of hiding undesirable study results -- the company agreed to release the results of the clinical trial. And what did the results show? Steven Nissen, head of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, said, "This drug doesn't work. Period. It just doesn't work. ... In fact, the data on both the rate of progression of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events are trending in the wrong direction. This is a pretty clear failure. Physicians should now stop using ezetimibe or Vytorin except as a last resort."

In other words, the clinical trial results showed Vytorin to be a complete failure at reducing arterial plaque. This brings up three hugely important questions for modern medicine:

Question 1: Why was Vytorin approved by the FDA if it didn't work?

I find it curious that this test to determine whether Vytorin actually works was being conducted after it was approved by the FDA, don't you? As it turns out, all the millions of people who were prescribed Vytorin were being used as human guinea pigs, shelling out their hard-earned cash for a drug that was medically worthless. So why did the FDA approve Vytorin in the first place? Doesn't the FDA require some kind of proof that the drug works before approving it?

Of course not. You have to remember: The FDA operates as the marketing branch of Big Pharma. It's sole purpose is to promote drugs, not to protect the health of the public. The FDA approved Vytorin simply because Vytorin was poised to be a huge profit generator. At the FDA, real science is not nearly as important as big profits, and the agency maintains a default position of trusting clinical trials funded by the drug companies themselves! There's no real science going on at the FDA anymore (except in the back rooms where real scientists like Dr. David Graham are intimidated, censored or fired from their jobs). Instead, the FDA has become Big Pharma's pimp daddy, exploiting anyone it can to generate more obscene profits for its favorite clients: The drug companies.

It all makes you wonder: Where is the "evidence" in evidence-based medicine? The evidence, it seems, is all fiction. When drug companies are allowed to sell drugs that don't work, and the scientific results are allowed to be kept from the public for nearly two years, it's fairly obvious that the whole system of FDA-approved medicine is nothing more than a grand medical fraud.

The only people still defending this industry are idiots, crooks, politicians or lawyers. (Some people are all four.) There is no rational-minded person who could look at the behavior of Big Pharma and the FDA today and conclude that modern pharmaceutical medicine is based on anything resembling high-integrity science. This Vytorin debacle barely scratches the surface. Remember: This is something they failed to cover up! Imagine all the scientific trials that get buried, distorted or retroactively modified without anyone ever knowing about it!

Watch my Vytorin parody video to see how hilarious this whole situation has truly become:
http://www.newstarget.com/022501.html

Question 2: Why did Merck delay the release of the Vytorin clinical trial results?

The answer to this one is so obvious that it boggles the mind: Merck delayed release of the results because it knew that the minute the medical community learned the truth about Vytorin, prescriptions for the drug would plummet! And that, of course, would mean a drop in revenues and profits for Merck.

The Vytorin results were delayed simply to keep everybody ignorant of the fact that the drug didn't work! By keeping doctors, the FDA and the public ignorant of this fact, Merck allowed literally millions of prescriptions to be written for a drug that it already knew was clinically worthless at reducing arterial plaque.

Does anybody honestly think that if the Vytorin trial had showed extremely positive results, Merck wouldn't have released it immediately? Of course they would have! If this trial showed Vytorin to dramatically reduce plaque in the arteries while reducing deaths from heart attacks and strokes, Merck would have touted the study results way back in 2006. The fact that they intentionally delayed the release of this data just goes to show you that at Merck, it's not patients that come first... it's profits!

Question 3: If Vytorin lowers cholesterol but doesn't reduce arterial plaque, then shouldn't medicine reconsider the idea that high cholesterol causes arterial plaque?

The whole thinking behind Vytorin is that lowering LDL cholesterol would reduce the buildup of arterial plaque. Modern medicine has operated for over two decades on the myth that says cholesterol is solely responsible for atherosclerosis (plaque in the arteries).

Well what if that idea was, in fact, complete nonsense?

As practitioners of natural medicine have known for decades, cholesterol is not the evil disease-causing culprit it's made out to be by Big Pharma. High cholesterol is not a disease! Cholesterol is, in fact, an essential substance manufactured by the body in response to chronic circulatory inflammation caused by other things: Like eating red meat, fried foods, hydrogenated oils or processed foods. Cholesterol doesn't actually cause plaque in the arteries, and in fact this new ENHANCE study demonstrates that quite well: Vytorin caused a significant drop in LDL cholesterol levels, but arterial plaque actually began to increase!

The drug companies, however, love to promote simplistic explanations for diseases -- especially ones that can be reduced to a single number, like your cholesterol score. That way, they can define a "disease" as being a number that's too high, and then they can claim to "treat" the disease by giving you a chemical that causes the number to drop.

That way, they can even produce test results that convince you their drug is working. "See? Your number is lower now. The drug works!"

Big Pharma loves the idea of reducing medical treatments to one-dimensional number-pushing games that completely overlook the complexities of human biology. High cholesterol wasn't even considered a disease, by the way, until the drug companies started marketing cholesterol drugs and engaging in aggressive disease mongering to convince the public that their cholesterol numbers were too high.

The way to naturally lower your cholesterol numbers, by the way, is to simply stop eating all animal products and processed foods. A plant-based diet will radically improve your cardiovascular health, removing plaque, normalizing cholesterol levels and dramatically reducing your risk of heart attack or stroke.

Read the book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn to learn the shocking truth about how easy it is to normalize your cardiovascular health through simple dietary changes (no drugs needed!).

Conclusion: Vytorin fraud demonstrates lack of scientific integrity in the pharmaceutical industry today

If there's one thing to take away from this whole fiasco, it's that when it comes to pharmaceuticals, you simply can't trust the science anymore.

Let me repeat that: You can't trust the science anymore!

There's so much fraud, distortion, corruption, misrepresentation, exaggeration and outright lying by drug companies and the FDA that the whole drug-pushing industry comes down to nothing but sophisticated (and profitable) quackery. The biggest quacks in the history of medicine are, without question, the drug companies operating today.

If you haven't already, be sure to check out my video parody at http://www.newstarget.com/022501.html which makes fun of this outright quackery.

So where does this put us? It means that any person choosing to use pharmaceuticals is playing the role of a human guinea pig, carrying out the medical experiments of the richest corporations in the world, while paying for it all the while!

It also means the entire foundation of modern medicine is a cruel hoax, rotten at the core, based on nothing more than wishful thinking and manipulative marketing.

It means that the doctors who have been prescribing these pills are fools. They've been easily manipulated by Big Pharma money, dazzled by distorted science, and transformed into puppet profit generators.

It means that pharmaceutical medicine (if you can even call it that) is finally being exposed as the grand fraud it has truly become.

Intelligent people have already largely turned away from drug-based medicine, realizing that the only medicines that are safe, effective and affordable are those medicines provided by Mother Nature in the form of herbs, foods, superfoods and phytonutrients. Mother Nature doesn't need to conduct fraudulent science to market her medicines -- they work naturally! Mother Nature needs no patent protection, no television ads, no defense attorneys and no bribery for her medicine. It simply works naturally and automatically, without asking for anything in return.

That's why informed consumers are turning to natural medicine. Only uninformed, ignorant consumers continue to rely on pharmaceuticals today. And my prediction? Most of those people are going to pay for their ignorance with their lives. Even though the causes of death will likely be listed as "natural causes," the truth is that most people who routinely take pharmaceuticals are ultimately killed by them through the failure of internal organs damaged by such drugs -- usually the liver, heart, pancreas or kidneys.

What Big Pharma has done -- and continues to do -- to human beings in North America and around the world is nothing less than an atrocious crime against humanity. That crime remains, as yet, unpunished. But I believe there will come a day when the backlash against these drug companies will be unleashed, and when that happens, even God will not be able to help these Big Pharma CEOs escape the terrible punishment likely to be inflicted upon them by four outraged generations of the People who have lost so much life, health and happiness at the hands of these malicious drug companies who have, at every opportunity, traded the People's lives for Pharma profits.