Actavis is this third largest generic drug manufacturer in the world and Warner Chilcott is also up there, most notable for buying Procter & Gamble's prescription drug arm a few years back. They make everything from aspirin to Prozac and chances are you're taking a drug manufactured by one of these two companies and it's pretty likely that you know someone who is kept alive by their products.
Merges in pharma often come with increased manufacturing capabilities and more efficient sales. Done right this merger could save people tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drugs around the world and make them more accessible. You really think that has less impact than Tumblr?
The problem with your reasoning is that people already know that the pharma industry has a complex industrial structure, and that mergers happen from time to time. Furthermore, prices change constantly for a variety of reasons. None of this imply that this merger is particularly interesting as news.
By your logic, people should be constantly bombarded with "important" stuff like price indices for medical services, world food prices, aggregate steel production, measures of industry concentration in the wholesale corn market etc.
"By your logic, people should be constantly bombarded with "important" stuff like price indices for medical services, world food prices, aggregate steel production, measures of industry concentration in the wholesale corn market etc."
Never did I say anything about bombarding anyone or price indices. My logic is that media should give a more equal representation to major industry events like M&As, especially when two such events occur on the same day. I would not argue this if the acquired company was some Tubmlr sized biotech firm with a drug in trials, but this is a merger between two pharmaceutical manufacturers that outsize Tumblr in almost every statistic (users, revenue, employees, etc.) by 1-3 orders of magnitude.
Oh and most people know nothing about pharma, just like they know little about what goes on in the background of their favorite sites in Silicon Valley, especially with acquisitions where integration takes a while and the public gets bored and forgets the event even happened.
Merges in pharma often come with increased manufacturing capabilities and more efficient sales. Done right this merger could save people tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drugs around the world and make them more accessible. You really think that has less impact than Tumblr?