Into rabbit holes and chasing deadlines

these contraceptives from getting thrown away when these reach its expiration dates.

For instance, Implanon NXT - contrary to earlier reports that it will expire in 2020, what indicated in the carton labels exclusive for DOH use was its expiration date will be March 2019. And this is the reason why DoH tapped PopCom - an agency which has a mandate to information dissemination and demand generation - as additional help in administering these contraceptives.

As Gupit also said, since they are already in the function of lecturing family planning methods, might as well their agency be a supporting agency to give contraceptives in line with DOH’s goals.

If you are reading this article online, you can see PopCom’s activity last week and Implanon NXT’s packaging through the photos shown.

Implanon NXT is one of the many other contraceptives nearing expiration dates. Based on consolidated media reports, there are already 37 artificial contraceptive brands that expired since DoH purchased them in 2015. There will be five more, starting September, that are about to get expired this 2018; another five to expire in 2019.

The race in beating the expiration dates began when pro-life groups, Alliance for the Family Foundation Philippines, filed a petition in the Supreme Court (SC) in 2015, with an aim to stop the administration of artificial contraceptives including Implanon NXT, because these groups believed that it is abortifacient drugs.

It was only in 2017 when the SC lifted the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) from administering these contraceptives, after the Food and Drugs Administration of DoH has issued a report that the said contraceptives in question are non-abortifacient or drugs that can not induce or be used in abortion.

By the time SC lifted the TRO, there are already 27 contraceptive brands went expired, and that means hundreds of millions lost for DOH since these were never used at all. Gupit shared that during the time of Secretary Paulyn Ubial, it was said that she plans to donate it to other countries instead of throwing these contraceptives away unused.

Implanon NXT was manufactured by NV Organon, a Netherlands-based pharmaceutical company specializing in fertility, gynecology and selected areas of anesthesia, as per public information. But Organon is just one of the many subsidiaries of pharmaceutical companies worldwide as its umbrella company is Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD) or Merck and Company, Inc. In the United States.

Based on the Implanon NXT packages exclusive use for DoH, MSD has a Philippine office located in Paseo de Roxas, Makati City. MSD is considered the seventh largest pharmaceutical company in the world.

“Interesting” things came out while checking the background of these companies:

In 2014, Organon USA Inc. has agreed to pay $31 million to settle allegations from the federal government and several states, including New York and Kentucky, that it underpaid rebates to state Medicaid programs, in addition to some “kickback” allegations through offering improper financial incentives to nursing home pharmacy companies, and misrepresented drug prices and promoted drugs for off-label, according to the state attorneys general.

Meanwhile, it was New York Time reported that from 2002 through 2005, Merck’s Australian affiliate allegedly paid Elsevier, an information and analytics company and one of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information. This means that Merck paid a certain amount to Elsevier to publish eight issues of a medical journal, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

The content of the researchers appeared to be independently peer-reviewed but it turned out that Merck had paid for it, and the journals in question actually reprinted articles that originally appeared in other publications and that were favorable to Merck.

The misleading publication came to light in 2009 during a personal injury lawsuit filed over Vioxx, which is also known as Rofecoxib, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that has now been withdrawn over safety concerns. It turned out, nine of 29 articles in the Elsevier journal’s second issue referred positively to Vioxx. This later prompted the Chief Executive Officer of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division, Michael Hansen, to admit that the practice was “unacceptable.”

For most academics in the Philippines, to have their researches published in one of the journals of Elsevier, it is something an achievement of wide proportions. And here we are that even as a scholarly prestigious organization like Elsevier - can be bought by the big pharma industries of the world.

Then here’s another rub, the DOH also purchased Implanon NXT’s cousin, the Merck-produced “NuvaRing,” a condom-like vaginal ring inserted inside women’s vaginas to prevent pregnancy within a month.

But NuvaRing has pending lawsuits in the United States because it claimed to have some serious side effects in some users. Data from Drugwatch.com showed that Merck & Co. has to settle a total of $100 million with 3,800