For once, our very own Food and Drugs Administration, the habitually docile FDA, prevailed upon a multinational drug company. Whew!
This time under its director general Nela Charade Puno, the FDA was able to stop the TV and radio ad campaign for dengue vaccine called Dengvaxia.
Maker of the drug is the French firm Sanofil Pasteur, a subsidiary of Sanofi Aventis, the world’s third largest drug company.
For an idea of its size, let us just say that its total annual revenue is more than half of the yearly budget of the Republic of the Philippines.
Anyway, Puno even had to threaten the local office of Sanofi Pasteur, now facing various stiff sanctions from the FDA.
To stop the ads, the FDA came out with the CDO, the dreaded “cease and desist order,” some four months ago.
The order could have been a reaction to the congressional investigation of the death of two public school pupils, who reportedly had the dengue vaccine.
Thus there was talk of stopping the vaccination program sponsored by the Department of Health, using the drug of Sanofi Pasteur.
That was in July last year, the first month of the Duterte administration, although it was hard to ascertain whether the two deaths were included in the fake tally of EJKs that became the worldwide “official” fake tally.
Moreover, it was noted that the original budget of the vaccination program was only P3 billion, but its bill came up to P3.5 billion. Who would foot the P500 million difference – not the drug company for sure.
As if to counter the reports on the congressional inquiry, Sanofi Pasteur stuck to the ad campaign, despite the FDA’s 28-year-old well-kept rule on the ad ban on prescription drugs.
In short, what Sanofi Pasteur did was patently illegal.
The FDA also ruled that the company could not do promos in malls, similar to the pesky campaigns for credit cards and condos.
It also could not use the ads in social media, despite its messy state of “unregulatedness,” and so you can fart on just about anybody in social media and get away with it.
That was last December, and Sanofi Pasteur could not be bothered to comply with the FDA order. After all, the FDA was well known for being toothless.
And so the FDA slapped the company with an administrative case, in which the sanction could be outright license cancelation.
The FDA then went directly to the TV networks and radio stations to stop the ads, and Puno finally checked the Sanofil Pasteur item in her to-do list.
Now she wants to tackle the next box, the “fake” drugs, the generic name for those food products and cosmetics unregistered with the FDA.
Still, those huge multinationals were known to have no qualms in muscling this country. As they say, he who has the dough makes the rules.
One of them wanted to stop legislation to reduce the price of medicines, and the House Speaker at that time even openly scolded its representatives during a hearing.
Another foreign firm stopped the production of a hytertension medication that would have made it affordable to millions of Filipinos.
Congressional records showed that, in the hearings on the DOH dengue vaccine campaign, the program was actually hatched in Paris in December 2014 during the visit of Benigno Simeon, aka BS.
Just a few days later, the FDA approved the program. In less than a month, the DOH made the purchase order. And in no time at all, it got the money from the Department of Budget and Management. That fast!
Yet the people of Sanofil Pasteur admitted in the hearings that the campaign was its first ever attempt at large scale dengue vaccination anywhere in the world.
And they just had to do it in the Philippines? Thanks to the Aquino (Part II) administration.
Putting out the ads was a bold faced violation of the law, and now that FDA stopped it, could Puno just forget the sanctions?
It seemed that her message was simple: Watch out.
She refused to use the usual FDA alibi that it lacked the personnel to enforce its own rules, because she immediately called on the PNP for help.
You know the reputation of the PNP nowadays: As long as the police is walking the straight path, they have the full backing of the motorbiking Duterte Harley.