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CORPORATE social responsibility. The Bureau of Food
and Drugs (BFAD) couldn’t have picked a better phrase to describe
what’s in question after the agency ordered the recall of
Wyeth’s baby-milk products for possible contamination.
If it has to do more than just
pay lip service to this popular corporate mantra, then the
multinational company has to comply with the government’s recall
order immediately. No ifs and buts about it. Now’s not the time to
make promises, but to actually deliver on them.
The United States-based company
claims the milk products haven’t been contaminated, adding that
the matter is a packaging problem and the damage to the products
merely cosmetic. It said that about 2.5 million cans and boxes of
the products may have been affected by faulty storage that exposed
the items to the elements. The BFAD, however, doesn’t buy it,
adding that the slip-up could involve as many as 4.3 million units.
While complaints about the quality of the affected products have yet
to reach it, the BFAD said it would rather err on the side of
caution. And rightly so, especially since it’s the future of the
country that’s at stake.
The affected products after all
are consumed by babies, and the company, through years of
advertising, has been telling parents to trust its products so they
would have exceptional sons and daughters who could perform above
average in their chosen fields in the future. Remember Promil’s
“gifted child”? How about Wyeth’s Bonna-kid, the so-called
“batang may laban” (loosely translated, the kid with the
fighting chance)?
Imagine what parents who have
been feeding their children these Wyeth products are thinking
nowadays. Try deception, or worse, betrayal. Indeed, the issue
concerns trust.
As per the company’s admission,
it discovered the storage problem as early as July last year. It
tested the said items and found the integrity of the products
intact. Despite its findings, the public, however, didn’t hear
about this incident until merely a few days ago when the government
ordered the recall.
We cannot help but compare
Wyeth’s response with what other companies have done in the past.
Remember the Tylenol scare during the 1980s? Faced with new rumors
of cyanide lacing of the pain medication, Johnson & Johnson did
the only proper thing at the time and recalled every tablet of
Tylenol until such time that the company could ensure the integrity
of its product. That has since become a classic in the corporate
social responsibility literature on how companies should respond to
crisis.
The most prudent thing for Wyeth
to do therefore is to comply with the recall order as soon as
possible and argue with the government on the merits of its findings
later on through the proper forum.
In its website, Wyeth says that
“integrity” and “respect for people” are two of its core
corporate values. By the company’s own definition, integrity
involves taking responsibility for one’s actions, while respecting
people encompasses fostering an environment of trust.
As things stand today, that trust
has been broken.
Wyeth’s predicament couldn’t
have come at a worse time for the infant-milk formula industry. The
industry is being assailed on many fronts for its aggressive
advertising of their products. Opposition runs the whole gamut of
the government, nongovernment organizations and multilateral aid
agencies like Unicef and the World Health Organization. The Supreme
Court is currently hearing a case on the matter.
It would be unfortunate for
well-informed mothers who use infant-milk formula judiciously if
Wyeth’s refusal to heed the BFAD moves to the High Tribunal rules
against the industry only because of Wyeth’s public relations
disaster.
Wyeth would do its industry—and
more importantly mothers in special circumstances—a service if it
acts promptly on the recall order and not fuel public anger over the
whole matter. Barring prompt action, the multinational firm risks
going down in history as the company that ended up feeding the
“stunted child” and the “batang may kalawang” (loosely
translated, the “rusty child”).
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