Congress probes Vytorin insider info on CafePharma, first revealed by BrandweekNRX.

Based on a recent article in BrandweekNRX, the House Energy & Commerce Committee is widening its investigation into the handling of the ENHANCE trial and about who knew what at Schering-Plough and Merck.

Four weeks ago BrandweekNRX revealed that Schering-Plough's Carrie Cox sold $28 million worth of company stock last year, during a time period when the company tried to change primary endpoints for the Vytorin trial and also appeared to try to delay release of the disastrous results. This story was then picked up by the mainstream media.

On January 30, we were first again, with the article "New evidence indicates Schering-Plough insiders knew the Vytorin trial was "a bust" on March 13, 2007."

In that story we revealed that detailed insider information about the botched trial had been available on Schering-Plough's message board on CafePharma as early as March 13, 2007. Now the information BrandweekNRX was first to reveal has resulted in additional questions from Congress:

The House Energy & Commerce Committee yesterday wrote to Fred Hassan at Schering-Plough and Richard Clark at Merck, "These Web site entries are obviously troubling and raise again the question of whether anyone within Merck or Schering-Plough knew the results of the ENHANCE trial prior to the official release of the data."

The letter also asks for "a written explanation as to when and how Merck and Schering-Plough officials first became aware of these Cafepharma.com posts." The committee also wants to know what the companies have done to investigate the sources of these posts, and all records relating to the posts.

But the House Energy & Commerce Committee doesn't stop there. They also wrote to Sarah Palmer at CafePharma, citing all the CafePharma posts that BrandweekNRX posted, and request all records, names and IP addresses for the posts in question. And in order to ensure that no document destruction is taking place, they also wrote, "if such information is not available, please provide your companies' policies relating to maintaining and/or storing such information."

Dr. Rost is a pharmaceuital litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

Comments

[scott]

John Dingell and Bart Stupak must be complete morons. Cafe Pharma is absolutely equivalent to a gossip column in Star magazine. Over 99% is completely manufactured. Both should consider a new job.