Monday 6th September 2010
A shortage of branded medication is expected by hospital pharmacists, a new study has revealed.

The Chemist+Druggist (C+D) Stock Survey 2010 revealed that over 80 per cent of those in the industry are of this opinion, with nearly 90 per cent spending more than one hour each week trying to find key medicines.

What's more, the report found that Cipralex, an anti-depressant, breast cancer drug Femara and Sinemet, for Parkinson's, are among the hardest to obtain.

And it was also seen that over 40 of those asked noted that patients had suffered as a result of this difficulty, either through distress, anxiety or a hospital admission, while, according to the Press Association, 70 per cent of respondents admitted they were very concerned that their charges had been affected by the dearth of drugs.

C+D laid the blame at the feet of manufacturer supply deals, with more than 70 per cent of pharmacists stating it is harder to get products from pharma companies operating distribution schemes.
Written by Martin Lambert
http://www.mediplacements.com/articl...ts_expect.html

Mediplacements: We have a team of editors dedicted to bringing you breaking news from within the medical sector. All our articles are completely unbiased and based on the industry as a whole.

Is this Off Topic, or is it the central topic? Merck management has little time to deal with minor problems, such as sick people, because the top levels of the company are so busy with lawsuits and corporate games. They are not asking, “What can we do for Parkinson’s people?” They are asking, “Did we just blow $2,600,000,000 because the shareholders and legal people figured out that we lied when we pretended that Schering was buying Merck when actually Merck was buying Schering and absurdly false legal games were played to rip off Johnson & Johnson?” and even more important: if the deal for this drug dies because of the dishonesty towards J&J, what will happen to the $51,000,000 severence cheque that CEO Fred Hassan cashed in for himself for doing the fake deal?”
These people have no time and no reason to worry about some cheap pill called “sinemet”.. Their attention is always focused somewhere else.
And there is a photocopy machine that keeps on going. Such a hassle when the internet characters get on their case. Somehow information keeps leaking out.

How Merck Bet $2.6B on a Technicality
By Jim Edwards | September 7, 2010 BNet Placebo Effect

Up to $2.6 billion of Merck (MRK)’s revenue hangs on a technicality in a legal document, and it could all be washed away by the end of September…., Merck disclosed today. …The technicality revolves around Merck’s deal with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) which allows Merck to sell Remicade,…
Originally, J&J and Schering-Plough made a deal which gave Schering rights to sell Remicade. That deal stated that if Schering ever experienced a “change of control” then it could be cancelled ….
Normally, when one company buys another, the company being bought undergoes a “change of control.” In the Merck-Schering acquisition, however, both companies’ lawyers performed a set of legal tricks to make it look like Schering was actually buying Merck and then renaming itself “Merck.” The company even reissued new Merck stock in place of old Merck stock — even though the two stocks are identical instruments from a financial point of view, and even have the same stock symbol, MRK. The maneuvering was clearly a figleaf, as Schering CEO Fred Hassan cashed out a staggering $50 million severance payment based in large part on a change-of-control provision that triggered such payments….
…. Merck must hope that the arbitrator — who has much more leeway than a judge and can rule based on technicalities or merits — will abandon common sense and decide that even though the Remicade deal waddles and quacks like a duck, it is not a duck per se.
That’s an extraordinary thing upon which to bet $2.6 billion.
http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-busine...tag=nl.rSINGLE

Correction from new blog called New Merck: it's $10 billion:

....."The only thing Jim Edwards, at B|Net's Placebo Effect, is wrong about (and now, by copying his, FiercePharma is, too) is the size of the potential liability: it is not $2.6 or $2.7 billion -- it is closer to $10 billion, over the next three years -- from Merck's perspective. Simponi® sales are ramping up ferociously overseas, and Remicade® is a juggernaut -- outside the US. And all of that may vanish into the mists of Brigadoon, and soon -- for New Merck.
It was Schering-Plough, afterall, that had entered the non-US distribution pact with J&J's Centocor. Now its CEO is gone; its stock is no longer listed on the NYSE; its board of directors disbanded (save 3 -- of 12). . . yet Merck would say that tiny old Schering-Plough ate its lunch. A ghost did it, I guess. See FiercePharma, on it -- this morning:
. . . .That technicality may or may not hold water with the arbitration panel of three former federal judges. Sure, it's all there in the fine print: Merck suffered a change in control, not Schering; Schering was the buyer, not the seller. But as BNet Pharma points out, the reverse merger was enough of a "change in control" to trigger Schering CEO Fred Hassan's $50 million golden handshake.
Remicade is now Merck's second-biggest drug. If it has to say goodbye to those revenues -- just as it did to Fred Hassan -- one of its reasons for buying Schering in the first place will have vanished. And Merck's stock price would suffer, angering investors. . . .
In general, Jim Edwards' coverage really nailed it, yesterday -- so much so, that FiercePharma's Tracy Stanton quoted him, today, in the above piece."

http://anewmerckreviewed.wordpress.c...r-arbitration/

hey, what's ten billion between friends?

Nothing surprises me anymore. Can anyone say ruthless?

I have found it of great interest through this year, that when looking at the Merck MSD sites and their primary product links, Sinemet is not listed.

That is where we are on the scale of things.

Invisible.

Lindy

The mysterious disappearance of sinemet under the Merck Sharp & Dohme label parallels the curious disappearance of Schering-Plough Corporation.
There are 4 companies in this story: Merck (world headquarters in New Jersey, U.S.A); its subsidiary, Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in the U.K., (and we will include in there the endless other subsidiaries with the same name, in countries around the world, such as MSD Australia); Johnson & Johnson, and Schering-Plough. Are you following? There will be a test.
Merck in the U.S. was accumulating too much cash by sellings drugs to sick people, so they took $42 billion out of the coffee jar in the kitchen, and decided to buy Schering-Plough, partly because Schering-Plough possessed the rights to market a drug called Remicade, a drug owned by Johnson & Johnson, with current sales of a mere $3 billion per year expected to escalate.
Trouble in paradise: the contract between Schering-Plough and J&J states that the licence for Schering-Plough to market this drug can be revoked by J&J if Schering-Plough undergoes “a change of control” – if they are bought up or merged. So Merck cannot get its hands on the drug by purchasing Schering. Somehow Schering has to pretend to be in control.
The structure of the deal is pretty much in place by the spring of 2009, but the deal is not done. Something has to be figured out to get around the J&J clause. But the market suspects the deal is going to happen.
Rumours circulated that somehow there might be a problem getting sinemet, so people in the U.K. started hoarding – causing a greater shortage. The rest of the world was unaware.
Then, 2 things happened in early 2010: (1) Schering-Plough ceased to exist; and (2) Merck Sharp & Dohme sent out letters to every neurologist, General Practictioner, pharmacist,, druggist and chemist in Australia and throughout Europe. (Merck does NOT sell sinemet in Canada or the U.S.A. Bristol Myers Squib does.)
By, we are told, pure co-incidence, MSD timed the shut down of sinemet production with the timing of the coming-into-effect of their deal to buy Schering. MSD said they lost their supplier of an essential ingredient for sinemet. We have no idea who the supplier was. Merck SD said they have a contract with the supplier for confidentiality, and it is proprietary information, so we are not allowed to know what is going on with a drug that millions of us need to be able to walk down the street. We do not know if MSD ditched the supplier, or the supplier ditched MSD, or why, or if there was a “change of control” clause in the sinemet contract.
We do not know the secret reasons behind this dangerous situation. We do not know why, suddenly, Merck SD can no longer get the ingredients of this drug.
But all the same people, the same companies, were at the same time causing Schering-Plough to disappear, and we do know what happened there, because American law is the most forceful in the world in this respect: public companies have to reveal everything to the Securities Exchange Commission – the SEC. And so, here is how Merck got its hands on J&J’s drugs by buying Schering but pretending that Schering bought them:
Two new companies were formed by Schering-Plough. They were named SP Subsidiary Number One Inc. and SP Subsidiary Number Two, Inc. “SP” means Schering-Plough, to make it very clear that these subsidiaries were under its control.
Now, the Merck head office figured maybe One Inc. and Two Inc. could work together - same name except for the number; - so they had a flash of genius: why not have Merck change its name Number One Inc. and have Merck Sharp Dohme Inc. change its name to Number 2 Inc. --- and then the same day, while we are at it, let’s change the name to Merck Sharp & Dohme !
So now Merck was part of Merck Sharp & Dohme. But there was now no company called “Merck” in the U.S. of A. Well, the friendly folks down at Schering-Plough thought that was a pity, and since Merck had abandoned the name, it was available, so Schering-Plough went down to the courthouse and changed their name to “Merck”. All of this happened in an afternoon.
So, you see, it was all under the control of Schering, for about ten minutes, before it all went back to being Merck. So J&J would have to give the $3 billion a year to Merck, because for at least ten minutes it had been Schering-Plough.
Now, as to who is in control, it seems to be Merck. Because the first thing they did was fire the complete executive level of Schering; they fired 9 out of 12 of Schering’s board members, they fired thousands of Schering employees, they withdrew the Schering-Plough stock from the stock market, the also withdrew all of the old Merck shares, and replaced them with identical new Merck shares, and the name “Schering-Plough” disappeared forever and Merck has the rights to J&J’s drug. And it was in every way, a “change of control” of Schering-Plough, but it was packaged to deceive.
The CEO of Schering, Fred Hassan, received a $51 million severance cheque to do the deal and then get fired; although posts on pharma forums are arguing back and forth, that with stock options, Hassan actually gets $225 million, assuming the stock is still in the $35 range. Close to a quarter of a billion dollars, in one year, paid by profits from people who need drugs, for a man who had been on the job for only seven years.
A sad revelation for PWP who approached those companies with polite questions: the impact on People With Parkinson’s was never part of the decisions that were made, and CEO Fred Hassan of Schering was the subject of an article in the first week of September 2010, in pro-big-business Fortune Magazine, saying that Hassan is “the most heartless CEO in America”.
At the very top of the medical health industry. Heartless.
Not completely fair either, to call Hassan the worst. Merck and Schering have always been squeaky clean choir boys compared to the likes of Amgen or Pfizer.
So, are you ready for the test. Given the mess portrayed above, set off by a clause in the J&J contract that said they would rather dump the drug into the ocean than let Merck get their hands on it (and, Fortune listed the CEO of J&J as the third most heartless executive in America)’; given that Merck Sharp Dohme revealed that they cannot reveal anything because they have a “Silence of the Lambs clause” with the supplier of an essential ingredient of sinemet, given that MSD stopped producing sinemet when the deal with Schering came into effect:
Is it not within the realm of possibility that there is contract for sinemet with a “change of control” clause; with the supplier of the ingredient for sinemet. Another company that said, as J&J did, they would rather drop dead than be part of that.
And whereas Merck tied itself in knots of deception to get around J&J; they could not or did not bother to do the same to keep the sinemet flowing. If so, it is sad to contemplate that an essential drug for Parkinson’s, an addictive drug, the only drug in the past 50 years for this disease, was ignored, set aside, sacrificed, so that people like Fred Hassan could go home with a quarter of a billion dollars of money earned from sick people.
By way of comparison as to the magnitude: all the Parkinson’s research in America, including the U.S. Government, NIH, Michael J. Fox, all the foundations, all the private gifts, all the bequests, all the walk-a-thons and bike rides and door-to-door collection and bake sales… amounts to $200 million a year. CEO Fred Hassan was paid $225 million to go away. And 5 of his vice-presidents were each paid $40 million or more - there’s another $200 million. It cost the equivalent of 2 years of PD research to pay 6 people to participate in a fake deal and then disappear.
And it cost anguish and doubt and ill health, physical and mental, and continues to do so, for Parkinson’s people who need sinemet - and Merck says, in some countries, they can expect to wait until mid-2011.
The disappearance of Schering-Plough is all documented at the SEC. The disappearance of sinemet is a corporate secret. But it was done at the same time, by the same people, and my paranoid conspiracy theory is that maybe what was done at the same time by the same people was done the same way. That somewhere, there is a contract that says there can be no change of control. It was worth the money for them to play the game to grab the J&J pill and walk off wealthy; there was no incentive at all to buy out the sinemet contract for a bunch of Parkinson’s people. It is doubtful that the needs of sick people were even mentioned at any time during that year of shame. But they had their personal pay-offs perfectly arranged long in advance.
Pharma flunked the litmus test, again. They will not survive in that form. Nothing that functions like that will survive. But Parkies are not the ones who will take them down. They will be taken down by their own shareholders and their own employees. Most people really do know the difference between right and wrong. They don’t get to take home a quarter billion after seven years on the job. But from scientist to secretary to truck driver to salesmen, there are lots of good people in all of these companies, and the day will come when they too will say with the rest of us: “Enough. Enough. Enough.”
Signed,
Bob Dawson
P.S.: Are we having fun yet?
Is it possible that Parkinson’s people were cut off from an essential drug as part of a package that allowed the second largest drug company in the world to get its hands on a drug from J&J, worth ten billion dollars over three years? Guess who is asking that question now? The radicals and lefties and cripples and spastics? No, the shareholders of Johnson & Johnson. They just got burned for ten billion. Can you say “class action”?
From the contract between Schering-Plough and Johnson & Johnson (shhhhh! Don’t tell anybody she sent us a copy!)
Section 8.2. (c) Change in Control. If either party is acquired by a third party or otherwise comes under Control…. of a third party, it will promptly notify the other party not subject to such change of control. The party not subject to such change of control will have the right, however not later than thirty (30) days from such notification, to notify in writing the party subject to the change of Control of the termination of the Agreement taking effect immediately. As used herein “Change of Control” shall mean (i) any merger, reorganization, consolidation or combination in which a party to this Agreement is not the surviving corporation;..
EXPLANATORY NOTE: DEREGISTRATION OF SECURITIES
The Registration Statement on Form S-8 (Registration No. 333-139562) of Merck & Co., Inc. (“Merck”) pertaining to 155,000,000 shares of common stock of Merck & Co., Inc., par value $0.01 per share (the “Merck Common Stock”), under the Merck & Co., Inc. 2007 Incentive Stock Plan was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 21, 2006 (the “Registration Statement”).
On November 3, 2009, Merck completed its previously announced transactions with Schering-Plough Corporation (the “Parent”) pursuant to the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of March 8, 2009, as amended, by and among Merck, Parent, SP Merger Subsidiary One, Inc., and SP Merger Subsidiary Two, Inc. (the “Transactions”). In the Transactions, Merck merged into a subsidiary of Parent, Parent changed its name to Merck & Co., Inc. and Merck changed its name to Merck Sharp and Dohme Corp. In addition, each outstanding share of Merck Common Stock was automatically converted into the right to one share of common stock of Parent. Accordingly, Merck has terminated all offerings of Merck Common Stock under its existing registration statements, including the Registration Statement. In accordance with an undertaking made by Merck in the Registration Statement to remove from registration, by means of a post-effective amendment, and shares of Merck Common Stock which remain unsold at the termination of the offering, Merck hereby removes from registration 46,170,555 authorized shares of Merck Common Stock reserved for issuance under the Registration Statement that remain unsold and unissued as of the effective date of the Transactions (the “Unsold Shares”). Parent is concurrently filing a Registration Statement on Form S-8 (the “New Registration Statement”) to register, among other shares, the Unsold Shares with respect to the Plan. The $215,394 registration fee previously paid by Merck to register the Unsold Shares being deregistered under this Post-Effective Amendment No. 1 to the Registration Statement will be carried forward and applied to the registration fee due as a result of registering the Unsold Shares, among other shares, on the New Registration Statement.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...83714e10vq.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...984/ds8pos.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...304/dex991.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...113/ds8pos.htm
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...984/ds8pos.htm

Dear anonymous,

(1) So the severance pay for the top six people was only $140 million, of which Hassan got 50? Well,
that would be just the golden wristwatch. What about the stock options? I don't know how the "Stock incentive plan" was divided up. I don't know for example what happened to the 155 million shares that were valued at one cent each, not a bad deal when you can get $35 for each of them, on the stock market. I don't know how the shares were divided up or whether they're still in the cupboard somewhere and everybody forgot about them.

An insider's evaluation of the top four: $400 million
CEO Fred Hassan | $175 million

CFO Bob Bertolini | $117 million

EVP Carrie Cox | $52 million

GC Tom Sabatino | $55 million

Top Four Total | $400 million

http://shearlingsplowed.blogspot.com...2815-last.html

(2) This is not against free enterprise. Free enterprise is the financial foundation that makes a free society possible. But bank robbery is not free enterprise. This is not creative destruction, it’s soul destroying; it destroys creation.
(3) Why all these pages about this? In honor of the 48 Parkinson’s volunteers for the Amgen GDNF experiment. That was when we started to learn our place in the scheme.. The same as our place in this - the industry that grew around our illness has been taken over by bandits who should not be allowed to have anything to with Parkinson’s patients, given their track record of heartlessness, greed, and deceit.
Pharma flunked. They are finished. If not today, then tomorrow, or in 30 years. But they are finished. They do not believe that there are consequences for treating people like garbage. But there are.

Speechless.