Australia: Merck used fake academic journals to promote Vioxx
Documents have been revealed in court which apparently show that Merck
created fake medical journals with names such as 'The Australasian
Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine' to publish favourable reports on
its painkiller Vioxx.
The court case is a class-action lawsuit brought by nearly a thousand
people who said that Vioxx, which was pulled from the market five
years ago after it was linked to strokes and heart attacks, had
damaged their health and had been mis-sold.
The journals were produced by publisher Elsevier which was taken in by
the scam. The company attacked the practice and said it was reviewing
its entire list of publications to identify if there were other fakes
that had made it onto the list.
Doctors that had been listed as board members for the fake journal had
not known that their names were connected to the title in any way.
Merck had previously been found to have doctors' names associated with
ghost-written articles. None of this content was peer-reviewed.
The previous week, a proposed class-action suit against the company in
the US was rejected by a California state judge on the grounds that
there were too many variations in the circumstances of the individual
plaintiffs to be able to construct a class action. Around 2.4m
California residents are thought to have taken the drug before it was
withdrawn.