As Many May Have Noticed -- Merck Has Been/Remains Very "Steady State" -- For The Last Two Years...

But the idea here -- as broadcast (well, narorow-cast, actually), and written, from Wall and Broad, at least -- among sell side analysts, seems to be. . . to try just a little too hard to "manufacture" a story. [For our part, we prefer to just. . . fall silent -- as one may readily observe.]

As FiercePharma correctly notes this morning, at least two analysts -- one of whom has covered Merck since the time well before Merck and Schering-Plough became one company -- made largely "noise" stories, out of something that wasn't a "signal" at all.

This seems to be because Kenilworth, under Mr. Frazier's wise leadership -- no longer puts out much in the way of. . . puffery. And we all know even good analysts abhor a vacuum, even if the steady state information is. . . just. . . steady state.

Do read all of the Carly Helfand piece -- but here's a bit:

. . . .It all started last on Merck’s first-quarter conference call, when the company confirmed that data from the Keynote-407 trial—which is examining Keytruda alongside two different chemo regimens as a treatment for first-line, metastatic squamous non-small cell lung cancer—would be released at June’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

The thing was, Merck hadn’t yet released any top-line data from that trial, a factor that “led to fears that perhaps Merck was sitting on bad data,” Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson wrote in a note to clients. . . .

Of course, those "fears" were. . . just faux night fevers -- from the sheer terror of having. . . nothing. . . to say.

Now you know -- and onward, as a cool clear spring afternoon calls to me, anew. Be good to one another. Or, even better than good -- awesome!

नमस्ते