Pharmaceutical companies will likely face a swarm of attempts to restrict their media under President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, as many people up for powerful positions want drug ads banned from television.
Most prominently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health secretary, who is a longtime outspoken critic of pharmaceutical ads on TV, has repeatedly called for a ban on these commercials, arguing that it grants the industry more favorable coverage from broadcasters and does not improve Americans’ health.
“They’re not making us healthier,” he said of pharmaceutical products in an interview this year. “In a true free market, and if we were getting good information, we wouldn’t be taking so many of them.”
Yet, while Kennedy has called for an executive order, any attempts to ban or restrict the ads are likely to encounter obstacles in courts and in Congress.
Often on the grounds of the first amendment, efforts to moderately restrict drug ads have been repeatedly defeated in the courts. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drug’s price, but a judge blocked the move, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.
“No one’s putting the genie back in the bottle at this point,” said Dr. David Kessler, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in the 1990s.
One of Kennedy’s major critiques is that the ads sustain a corrupt relationship between the drug industry and news networks, asserting that the commercials serve as payments to broadcasters to limit unfavorable coverage of the industry and its products. He also contested that TV news networks would not give airtime to claims about a link between vaccines and autism, however, that theory has been discredited by numerous research studies.
“People like Anderson Cooper, like Jake Tapper, are really pharmaceutical reps,” he said in another interview last year, in addition to falsely claiming that Pfizer pays most of Cooper’s salary.
According to some analysts, the push against pharmaceutical ads on TV threatens to dent the revenues of drug companies, which can make back in sales five times as much as they spend on commercials. A ban would also bring uncertainty for major TV networks that make substantial revenue from pharmaceutical advertisers trying to reach older viewers, who tend to take more medications.
Research published in the National Library of Medicine has found that the majority of the top-advertised drugs offer little to no medical benefit compared to existing treatments, with many of them costing tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Yet, other research published in the NIH has shown that the ads can have counterintuitive effects, prompting patients to take an inexpensive generic drug that wasn’t being advertised but may be more appropriate. Advocates and critics alike have argued that there are some value in the commercials, like the possibility of them spurring older people to get a vaccine that they would not have otherwise.
Modern drug ads aimed at consumers began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the 1980s, but they were mostly kept off TV for years by a requirement that ads naming a specific illness include a list of details regarding possible side effects. In 1997, the F.D.A. relaxed its rules, allowing drug advertisers to briefly summarize the product’s risks.
The pharmaceutical industry is now on track to spend over $5 billion on national television advertisements this year, according to iSpot.TV, a company that tracks ads, The New York Times reported. More aggressive campaigns are designed for newer medications that haven’t yet gone generic but compete in a crowded field of similar drugs meant to reach patients with common conditions such as arthritis and diabetes.
