Penn State Hired Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier To Investigate The Sandusky Scandal Because Penn State Is Dumb

So Penn State now has PSU alum and Merck Chairman and CEO Kenneth Frazier looking into what went wrong in the Sandusky affair. Frazier more or less got Merck off the hook for endangering a lot of people with the company's crappy Vioxx painkiller. According to Snigdha Prakash at Slate:

Tens of thousands of former Vioxx users sued Merck after it withdrew the drug, alleging Vioxx had caused them to suffer heart attacks and strokes. Frazier, then the company's general counsel, declared Merck had done nothing wrong and refused to settle. "We'll fight every case," he declared, and hired top-flight law firms in several East Coast cities, in the South, in Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as a prominent New York firm to coordinate the overall strategy. It took three years and $2 billion in legal expenses for Frazier's hard-nosed tactics to pay off. Merck settled in late 2007 for a relative pittance, resolving some 50,000 Vioxx cases for just under $5 billion. It was a far cry from the $25 billion to $50 billion in liability that analysts had predicted when Merck withdrew the drug.

Sounds like a swell dude. More from Prakash:

[T]here is a terrible irony to their choice of Ken Frazier as its leader. Frazier, after all, rose to the top by burying monumental corporate failures at Merck. Those interested in learning the full and complete truth about what happened at Penn State have the right to be concerned that the cover-up of the cover-up has begun.

You'd think someone over at PSU would wise up about this mess. It's not like anyone's paying attention.