Merck & Co. Inc. is one of the leading pharmaceutical research driven companies in the world. According to their official website (2009) the company is dedicated in discovering, developing, manufacturing and marketing of innovative medical products. Merck creates and implements donate programs for people and countries that are in need for their medicines and are in difficult situation. They also publish unbiased medical manuals for not-for-profit service. They have 55 200 employees worldwide. The revenue for 2008 is 23.9 billion USD and the investments only for research, development and innovations for 2008 is 4.8 billion USD.
On Sep 30, 2004 Merck voluntarily withdrew from the market one of their most successful products Vioxx. The reason was that according to a clinical trial Vioxx consumption leads to increased risk of cardiovascular problems. This has raised one of the biggest scandals in the pharmaceutical field. What stands behind the withdrawal of a product that generated 2.5 billion USD per year and had more than 105 million prescriptions (Feder, 2004)? Were Merck executives concerned about the patients’ safety or only for well-being of the company? Did they react properly and did they respect the moral and ethical values in taking their decisions?
In 1999 Vioxx was registered based on study that showed its advantages regarding gastrointestinal side effects compared with other regular painkillers such as ibuprofen. Vioxx belongs to a group of medicines that is called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSDA) but unlike the regular NSDAs it is second generation NSDA, COX-2 inhibitor, which means that it keeps the good painkillers effects by significantly lowering gastrointestinal side effects. In January the same year Merck initiated Gastrointestinal Outcome Research (VIGOR) study. In the next year, as a part of indication expansion plan, they started a new trial that was designed to determine whether Vioxx could prevent colon polyps (APPROVe). In...