Merck Deleted Data

[MountainLaurel]

From a manuscript submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine more than 5 years ago about Vioxx. This is a link to a blogpost, but the article she cites is linked within:

"A top editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says that he was stunned to find out that data linking Vioxx to cardiovascular risk was deleted from a major study his journal published five years ago--and that it appears that Merck researchers may have deleted that data." (from the first paragraph)

According to the article, shortly after Merck recalled Vioxx from the market the editors of NEJM discovered a diskette containing earlier versions of the manuscript for the VIGOR trail published in NEJM November 2000. The early versions fo the manuscript contained a blank table entitled "CV events." Time stamps indicaed the data was deleted two days before the manuscript was submitted to NEJM. According to the Dr. Gregory Curfman, executive editor of NEJM, the identity of the person who deleted the table is a mystery. "When you hover the cursor over the editing changes, the identity of the editor pops up, and it just says 'Merck."

The eidtors of NEJM released an editorial on The New England Journal's Web site entitled "Expression of Concern," (10.1056/NEJMe058314)which calls on the VIGOR authors to submit a correction of the 2000 manuscript. "Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article," it read.

http://kraftylibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/12/merck-deleted-data.html