Minority advocate Frazier set to retire as Merck CEO
Longtime Merck executive Ken Frazier, whose leadership helped bring the drugmaker one of the most lucrative medicines in history and who is one of the few remaining Black CEOs of a major corporation, is retiring.
Frazier, Merck’s CEO since early 2011 and an advocate for minority advancement who took on then-President Donald Trump’s tacit support of white supremacists, will retire June 30.
Frazier, 66, will be replaced by Rob Davis, the chief financial officer since 2014, the company said Thursday. Frazier will become executive chairman of the board during a transition period.
Frazier joined Merck, now based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, in 1992 as general counsel to one of the company’s pharmaceutical businesses and worked his way up to the top job. He is one of the few Black CEOs at the head of a Fortune 500 company.
Last month, when Walgreens named Roz Brewer as its new CEO, there were four. With Frazier’s departure, that number is back down to three.
Black people make up 12.8% of the U.S. population but only 0.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are African American. They earn 10% of all college degrees and hold 8% of professional positions, but only 3.2% of all senior-level roles at Fortune 500 companies, according to Coqual, a think tank that studies workplace diversity.
At Merck, Frazier clashed with Trump over his refusal to condemn violence by the white supremacists who marched in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“America’s leaders must honor our fundamental
values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy,” Frazier said at the time.
He stepped down from the president’s manufacturing council and was attacked repeatedly by Trump on Twitter the same day. Other executives followed and the council was quickly disbanded.
Frazier spoke out publicly about inequality in the U.S. again last year during the protests that followed the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Frazier said it could just as easily have been him.
Frazier, a social justice advocate who has won awards from the NAACP and the National Minority Quality Forum, co-founded OneTen, a coalition of organizations committed to training and promoting 1 million Black Americans into family-sustaining jobs.
A Harvard-trained lawyer who grew up in a poor, rough Philadelphia neighborhood, Frazier was instrumental in successfully defending Merck against an
avalanche of lawsuits after its 2004 recall of painkiller Vioxx for causing heart attacks and strokes.
He also helped orchestrate arguably the best deal Merck ever made, its $41 billion acquisition of fellow New Jersey drugmaker Schering-Plough in 2009. That deal primarily was targeted at getting the company’s Organon women’s health business, which Merck now is in the process of spinning off to boost growth by both companies after the split.
But Schering-Plough’s research labs had a hidden gem that, once discovered and developed, became the world’s leading cancer immunotherapy drug, Keytruda.
“None of us were smart enough to know what we had in pembrolizumab,” Keytruda’s chemical name, Frazier said during a conference call Thursday.
Keytruda now generates $14 billion in annual sales — more than a quarter of Merck’s revenue. It’s approved for dozens of cancer types and patient groups.