You’ve clearly not read the materials so it is a bit disturbing you are jumping to defend Merck. Not everybody at the organization is crooked, but the culture there is toxic and has incentivized or pushed people to make bad decisions. The exec in charge of the warning label admitted it was inaccurate in deposition. I don’t know if this makes you feel better or worse, but it is just the reality of how it went down, and now there is conclusive proof.
The original post did an OK job of explaining how the case stumbled. They neglected the scientific case which was always going to be difficult. But they knew for decades about this. They would just argue that the information they hid was scientifically irrelevant, but that is clearly untrue because if that were the case they would have obviously disclosed it. Life isn’t fair.