The website where detailers love to dish last night posted a message of its own telling the House Energy & Commerce Committee 'thanks, but no thanks.' You may recall that, earlier this week, the committee
widened its probe yet again into the way Merck and Schering-Plough handled the controversial Enhance trial of their Vytorin cholesterol pill and, as part of their investigation, sought info on some intriguing threads that showed up several months ago on CafePharma.Those threads, which you can look at here, appeared to contain remarkably similar info to what eventually became known months later. Like nearly every post on CafePharma, however, the threads are entirely anonymous. So the commmittee wrote the site and asked for names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail and Internet provider addresses of anyone who posted about the Vytorin Enhance trial, setting off some anxiety among the gossipy visitors.
So last night, CafePharma webmaster Sarah Palmer posted a note to calm their nerves: "We've been getting a lot of questions about the Congressional Committee's request. We will not have any user information to provide related to anonymous posts, since we have not recorded any such information. At this point, we do not believe that there will be any relevant posts related to registered users."
1 Comment
CafePharma wisely designed their network and interface to prevent this problem. You can't be compelled to produce data that doesn't exist, it's that simple. If the posters on CafePharma were at all concerned that their identities would ever be revealed (if they posted anonymously), there would be nothing on those message boards at all. Let Congress get some CIA technology experts to sort through CafePharma's web logs if they think they will find anything, but they won't. It's electronic graffiti - unless you see who wrote it, you'll never know.