The companies that market the popular cholesterol drug Vytorin appear to have fabricated minutes of a meeting of an independent panel of experts hired by the companies after a congressional investigation of the drug was begun, according to documents released Friday.
The latest in joint congressional investigations is based on e-mails between a University of Wisconsin-Madison cardiologist and officials with the drug companies Merck and Schering-Plough, which are the midst of an ongoing controversy over whether they deliberately delayed the release of research results showing that the drug did not improve artery health.