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NY State Investigates Merck (MRK) And Schering-Plough (SGP)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Once Eliot Spitzer left his office as prosecutor to become governor of New York State many feared that there would be no one left to devil large corporations and Wall St. firms. The fears were premature. NY State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has taken up the sword.

The most recent of Cuomo’s tilts is in the direction of Big Pharma. He wants to know why Merck (MRK) and Schering-Plough (SGP) were so late releasing studies on their cholesterol drug Vytorin. According to The Wall Street Journal "Mr. Cuomo has served the companies with subpoenas as part of a probe into whether the companies "deliberately concealed" negative results from the study."

The results of drug trials involving Vytorin were ready in April 2006 but did not come out until early this year. The drug does not appear to work very well. Cuomo’s questioning is both fair and balanced.

The drug trial data under examination are not the first that Big Pharma has gotten to market late. Some trials are not widely circulated while others are. The ones kept quiet are usually not terribly positive for the drugs being test.

Big Pharma has not learned any lessons and Mr. Cuomo is unlikely to school them. But, he may keep them honest.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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