Kenneth Frazier: Cover Up Artist

Snigdha Prakash suspected Kenneth Frazier was selected to lead the Special Investigations Task Force as part of a PSU cover-up.  With his refusal to let anyone debate, let alone re-investigate, the Freeh Report and investigation, Frazier is showing his cards.

From Slate:

The Cover-Up Artist

Why is the CEO of Merck leading the sex-abuse investigation at Penn State?

By Snigdha Prakash|Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011, at 6:04 PM

Penn State University trustee and Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier will chair the internal committee investigating the Sandusky case

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Much remains unknown about the extent of the alleged child abuse by Penn State’s former football coach, Jerry Sandusky, and about how long and how much university officials knew of it. If past scandals are any guide, Sandusky’s alleged abuse claimed more than the eight victims identified by the grand jury investigation. (The New York Times reports today that police are working to confirm allegations by “close to 10” more suspected victims who have contacted authorities since Sandusky’s arrest on Nov. 5.) As each additional victim’s story become known, more attention will be focused on the question of why Penn State officials didn’t do more to stop the alleged sexual predator in their midst.

Late last week, the university’s trustees announced they would conduct their own “full and complete” investigation into the matter. The probe will be headed, though, by a man with a track record of protecting powerful institutions from the consequences of their inaction: the chairman and CEO of the Merck pharmaceutical company, Kenneth C. Frazier. A Penn State alum and Harvard-trained lawyer, Frazier is best known for his phenomenal success in defending a sordid chapter in Merck’s recent past—its years-long silence about the safety problems of the popular painkiller Vioxx.

For most of the five-and-a-half years it sold Vioxx, Merck knew the drug doubled the risk of cardiovascular problems among users, but it did not tell doctors or patients. Instead, it pursued an active disinformation campaign—telling doctors that Vioxx was safer for the heart than older painkillers (it was not), squashing university scientists who dared to dissent, and withholding clinical trial results that would have definitively proven Vioxx’s risks to federal regulators. In late 2004, after the weight of the evidence became impossible to deny, Merck abruptly pulled Vioxx from the market.

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