Better take the hit over a broken pledge ( and Plaid know their fair share about that sort of thing too) than plough more money into a pretty expensive fig leaf, seems to be their take.
Recently, the asthma pill was approved as an allergy medicine, and Merck is betting that it can convince hay fever sufferers to take it instead of antihistamines like Claritin, available cheap and without a prescription from Schering-Plough (nyse: SGP - news - people ), and Zyrtec, sold with a prescription by Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ).
That night, Merck and Schering-Plough issued a press release saying that an anonymous expert panel had advised them to take the extremely irregular step of changing the study's main goal, as set forth before the trial began.