Judge: Lawsuit Against Merck’s MMR Vaccine Fraud to Continue
In a recent story that no mainstream media outlet reported, a Pennsylvania federal judge ruled in favor of whistleblowers who have accused Merck of lying about the efficacy of its mumps vaccine (currently only available in combo with MMR). We had to find this story posted on a couple of websites representing lawyers. The lawsuit is brought by two whistleblowers, virologists who worked for Merck and are accusing Merck of lying about the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine. This story did garner mainstream news coverage back in 2012, before Merck's attorneys appealed and tried to get the case thrown out of court. This week, U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones II ruled that the whistleblowers had sufficiently pled that Merck might have provided false statements to the government and that the direct purchasers had shown enough evidence to establish that these falsehoods could have helped the company gain a monopoly. It is certainly understandable why the mainstream media does not want to touch this story, given the fact that one of the lead authors on a CDC published study in 2004 has also become a whistleblower, stating that the CDC withheld data from the public linking the MMR vaccine to a higher rate of autism among some children, specifically African American boys.