This assignment requires you to identify stakeholders who will be affected by whatever decision the company makes, prioritize their interests, and then recommend and justify a decision on how to proceed. Think about how the relevant stakeholders could be impacted by Merck's decision. You should put yourselves in each stakeholder's position--Why do they care about the outcome of the decision? How will they be affected? What outcome would they prefer? What are their arguments in support of their preferred outcome? Then, you will be asked to consider the decision from the perspective of Merck. This means you will need to evaluate the competing claims of stakeholders, rank their importance, and reach a decision on how to proceed. You should use your evaluation of each stakeholder's interests to justify your ultimate decision. Use the information the case gives you about the company to reach a decision, and cite this information in the arguments you make to justify your decision. Finally, you will need to address the implications of your decision--Make sure you've described how your decision will likely impact key stakeholders, and why even negative impacts did not impact the decision you reached. You must write your analysis in essay format. Look at the grading rubric within this content folder to see how you will be graded. As you will see, you will be graded on quality of information, mechanics, considering and identifying stakeholders, choosing a course of action and your analysis. Be sure to sufficiently explain your analysis using a framework. I cannot give you credit for what you do not include or do not explain. You are also required to cite to at least three external sources. Use the APA format for citations. Prior to submitting the case study, each member of the group must watch the videos below and review the PowerPoint on writing mechanics and business writing, both included in this content folder. Each video and the PowerPoint are worth five points. Those points are separate from the case study and fall under the "Other Assignments" category. The case study must be submitted through the link found in the Groups area of Blackboard. Be sure that it is submitted in a WORD DOCUMENT. The class day after the case study is submitted, each group member is required to bring to class their peer evaluation sheet. It is due that day. Anyone who fails to turn in a peer evaluation sheet will receive a penalty in points deducted on his/her individual case study grade. MERCK AND RIVER BLINDNESS Headquartered in New Jersey, Merck & Co. is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In 1978, Merck was about to lose patent protection on its two best-selling prescription drugs. These medications had provided a significant part of Merck’s $2 billion in annual sales. Because of imminent loss, Merck decided to pour millions into research to develop new medications. During just three years in the 1970s, the company invested over $1 billion in research and was rewarded with the discovery of four powerful medications. Profits, however, were never all that Merck cared about. In 1950, George W. Merck, then chairman of the company his father founded, said, “We try never to forget that medicine is for people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered that, the larger they have been.” This philosophy was at the core of Merck & Co.’s value system. RIVER BLINDNESS The disease onchocerciasis, known as river blindness, is caused by parasitic worms that live in the small black flies that breed in and about fast-moving rivers in developing countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. When a person is bitten by a fly (and some people are bitten thousands of times a day), the larvae of the worm can enter the person’s body. Theworms can grow to almost two feet long and can cause grotesque growths on an infected person. The real trouble comes, however, when theworms begin to reproduce and release millions of microscopic baby worms into a person’s system. The itching is so intense that some infected persons have committed suicide. As time passes, the larvae continue to cause severe problems, including blindness. In 1978, the World Health Organization estimated that more than 300,000 people were blind because of the disease, and another 18 million were infected. In 1978, the disease had no safe cure. Only two drugs could kill the parasite, but both had serious, even fatal, side effects. The only measure being taken to combat river blindness was the spraying of infected rivers with insecticides in the hope of killing the flies. However, even this wasn’t effective since the flies had built up immunity to the chemicals. MERCK’S ETHICAL QUANDARY Since it takes $200 million in research and 12 years to bring the average drug to market, the decision to pursue research is a complex one. Resources are finite, so dollars and time have to go to projects that hold the most promise in terms of making money to ensure the company continues to exist as well as of alleviating human suffering. This is an especially delicate issue when it comes to rare diseases, when a drug company’s investment could probably never be recouped because the number of people who would buy the drug is so small. The problem with developing a drug to combat river blindness was the flip side of the “orphan” drug dilemma. There were clearly your most important client. The CEO has called to ask you to commit a significant amount of time over the next couple of months to assist with a large certainly enough people suffering from the disease to justify the research, but since it was a disease afflicting people in some of the poorest parts of the world, those suffering from the disease could not pay for the medication. In 1978, Merckwas testing ivermectin, a drug for animals, to see if it could effectively kill parasites andworms. During this clinical testing, Merck discovered that the drug killed a parasite in horses thatwas very similar to theworm that caused river blindness in humans. This, therefore, was Merck’s dilemma: company scientists were encouraging the firm to invest in further research to determinewhether the drug could be adapted for safe usewith humans, but Merck knew it would likely never be a profitable product. Source: D. Bollier, Merck & Company (Stanford, CA: The Business Enterprise Trust, 1991).