Hightower Lowdown

Merck—the $5.2 billion-a-year drug giant—is upset that people think it's a greedheaded bloodsucker.

So, by jove, Merck's executives have decided to do something. Does that mean stopping their greedheaded bloodsucking? Don't be insane—bloodsucking is wildly profitable! Merck's honchos want to deal with the appearance of bloodsucking, not the money-making reality. Thus, they have now launched a $20 million advertising blitz to portray the drugmaker as a huggable, teddy bear of a corporation. Their PR slogan is "Merck: Where patients come first."

How cuddly. Less cuddly, however, is the fact that this blast of corporate back-patting follows the recent revelation that Merck's best-selling drug, the pain reliever Vioxx, has had an unfortunate side effect called "death" in patients who trusted it. Merck's top executives knew about this side effect but withheld the information from doctors, patients, the media, and regulators—all the better to suck profits before the news got out.

Now Merck hopes to deflect public disgust with ads featuring cute children, adding a tagline asserting that this altruistic corporation is out to eliminate cancer and Alzheimer's so that such adorable children should never suffer. What's not to love about that?

Another of the ads features a man-on-the-street interview with a guy saying that people shouldn't "have to choose between their groceries and their medicine." The announcer then intones, "At Merck, we believe in the same things you do." Gosh, really? Then why did Merck hire a horde of lobbyists to push through a law making it illegal for us folks in the USA to import Merck's medicines from Canada at a third of the price the bloodsucker is charging us here at home?

You don't have to be in Who's Who to know What's What. When a corporation throws $20 million into a PR campaign to try to tell you that it's "good"…it isn't.