Late yesterday Syl and I were invited to Bayer’s Head Office in Sydney to meet with Dr Twomey, Medical Director ANZ, and Fiona Tigar, Communications Manager. We presented them with a digital pdf of your signatures and comments up to then – about 45,000. It was a powerful moment for us; less than a week ago we thought we’d be lucky to get a few hundred signatures. Now we had too many to print out – 380 pages! Surely Bayer would listen to this!
Dr Twomey had read every personal email that you sent her and many of your comments on the petition. It was clear that she was as moved as we have been when reading your comments. She said it was rare for Bayer to receive personal stories and experiences from the public, they had never been targeted by a campaign like this before and everyone in the building was aware of it. They’d been monitoring the results on change.org and were utterly astounded by the vast numbers signing our petition by the minute.
But in spite of being overwhelmed the response to our petition Bayer is not yet ready to agree to market Visanne to Australia and NZ. They asked us come back in 6-8 weeks.