Charges that drug maker lied about MMR shot finally going to trial

It’s starting to look like every single parent who questions the Merck MMR shot is being put on trial.

But soon, Merck will be headed to a real courtroom – a federal court in Pennsylvania to answer charges of fraud about its MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine.

And the line of plaintiffs is getting longer all the time.

They include two former Merck employees, numerous doctors and medical clinics, and even the United States of America.

But, for now, the focus isn’t on the M for measles…

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United States of America v. Merck & Co.
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We’ve all been hearing those daily updates on the measles outbreak. When I was typing this, there were 141 reported cases.

But several years ago, there was a real outbreak. One that wasn’t covered day and night by the media.

I’m talking about 6,500 cases of mumps. And that was just in the Midwest.

And a few years after that, there were 5,000 confirmed cases of mumps. And in both those outbreaks, the people who came down with the illness were said to be among a “highly vaccinated population.”

Don’t worry…you read that right. And that will all start to make sense when you hear why Merck is being hauled into court.

The court documents contain a scathing description of how the drug maker deceived and falsified test results so it could say that the mumps portion of the vaccine was 95 percent effective.

When tests didn’t come out the way it wanted, Merck either made up false data or just threw those tests away and came up with different, underhanded ways to “study” the vaccine.

The Merck employees, who worked for the company as virologists, said this just didn’t happen one or two times. It went on for so long, the fraudulent testing was even given a name: “Protocol 007.”

Enter the US Government:

You see, the Feds are the biggest customers Big Pharma has. In fact, the court documents reveal that the CDC purchased 4 million doses of Merck’s “mislabeled and misbranded” MMR vaccine. In turn, the CDC sells those shots at a reduced price –to state health departments and the like.

The second set of lawsuits is a bit of an “off-shoot” of the original complaint.

In this one, doctors and medical offices claim that Merck monopolized the vaccine market with its defective product at “artificially inflated prices.” Forcing them to overpay for the MMR shot as Merck fraudulently positioned itself as the only game in town.

The court papers state that instead of coming up with a more effective vaccine, or letting other companies enter the market, Merck continued on with its lie that its shot was 95 percent effective.

One statement I keep hearing over and over during all this vaccine hysteria is that anyone who questions these shots is in a state of “science denial.”

But after getting a glimpse into the inner workings of Merck, I think we all now know where the real science deniers are coming from.

Sources:

MMR vaccine is less effective for mumps” Kimberly Leonard, February 6, 2015, U.S. News and World Report, usnews.com

“Merck has some explaining to do over its MMR vaccine claims” Lawrence Solomon, Huffington Post Politics, huffingtonpost.ca