Look at the stock price from 2001-2016. This is 15 years of failure. Who is held responsible? William Harrison from JP Morgan has done nothing but oversee failure. He should be the first to go. We need a new board and new senior leadership. Ken is just not getting the job done. He needs to resign. This stock has turned into a disgrace. Why did Perlmutter come back? What has he done? Answer: Nothing. 15 YEARS OF FAILURE!
But, he went to the Hah-vard Law School. So, he must be better than the rest of us? He did a number on Penn State, and then continued to do a number on MSD. I see pictures of him drinking wine at art galleries, but I don't see him making speeches about stock performance? Not strange, but par for the course.
See, the inside story is that the Cleveland Clinic fabricated the Vioxx results. A simple black box warning was necessary-- not a recall. This caused Peter Kim to resign. He went to Stanford where he continued to delegate responsibility to underlings.
The upside of Merck is the complete elimination of a worthless sales force and contract rep replacement!
A black box warning may have been all that was necessary, but MRK insisted that its "speakers" downplay the negative Vigor results at dinner meetings. The FDA got wind of the scheme, and the rest is history. Moral: Accept the outcomes and move on. PS: MRK leadership during the Vigor debacle thought they could smooth it all over, and they were so wrong. Didn't Advair have a black box warning? It survived and thrived. Not so for VIOXX.
Anyone that would call Merck a "great company", well, is probably dumb enough to believe that. Merck is a horrible company, a horrible employer and a horrible investment. FU Merck.
Hiring Thomas L. Lyon III the third definitely contributed to the demise of the company. Hiring young, narcissistic suck ups who have no experience but their dads' were successful business professors is not a great way to bring in good leadership. Merck's fall from grace stems from placing young narcissistic, sycophants in leadership with no experience. The company is top heavy in these idiots.