As usual with reports from Sens. Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus, the Avandia probe released over the weekend has opened a big can of worms. It’s not that there’s new data to look at, but that they’ve pulled back the curtain on Avandia, revealing troubling internal emails and reports at FDA and GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the drug. But the curtain has been pulled back even farther now: Dr. Steven Nissen, who wrote that original study raising questions about Avandia’s cardiovascular safety, has released an audiotape of a meeting he had with four Glaxo executives just before that study was published. Unbeknownst to him at the time, at least some of those executives had actually already read his work, because someone at the New England Journal of Medicine had leaked it to the company. The taped meeting raises several questions, not the least of which is whether Glaxo was trying to persuade Nissen to quash his study. Why hasn’t Glaxo done more to re-analyze the safety of Avandia, given that those executives promised Dr. Nissen almost three years ago that they would?