MOREon BMJ & Lancet Wedded to Merck & Merck's Medical Media Empire J

[Guest guest]

2 articles

BMJ & Lancet Wedded to Merck CME Partnership

&

Merck's Medical Media Empire

J

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/766/9/

BMJ & Lancet Wedded to Merck CME Partnership

Monday, 14 February 2011

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 Deer's series of articles attacking Dr.

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.

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 Deer series of

articles and the BMJ editorial excoriating Dr. 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

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

J

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 Deer recently wrote his three slanderous articles about

Dr

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 GlaxoKline (GSK); and with Dr 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. 's website, ,

http://www.slingshotpublications.com provides extensive analysis

about the vituperous Wakefield-Deer controversy.

Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy

http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com

Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy

Online/email courses - next classes start February 4

[Guest guest]

2 articles

BMJ & Lancet Wedded to Merck CME Partnership

&

Merck's Medical Media Empire

J

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/766/9/

BMJ & Lancet Wedded to Merck CME Partnership

Monday, 14 February 2011

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 Deer's series of articles attacking Dr.

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.

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 Deer series of

articles and the BMJ editorial excoriating Dr. 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

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

J

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 Deer recently wrote his three slanderous articles about

Dr

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 GlaxoKline (GSK); and with Dr 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. 's website, ,

http://www.slingshotpublications.com provides extensive analysis

about the vituperous Wakefield-Deer controversy.

Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy

http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com

Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy

Online/email courses - next classes start February 4