Posted on 09/10/2025 7:17:17 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
President Donald Trump has delivered another blow in his ongoing battle with the pharma industry, signing a memorandum on Tuesday that directs the FDA to rein in direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising.
The initiative, which has long been a priority for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is designed to roll back a 1997 policy shift that gave drugmakers a greater ability to advertise their products on television by relaxing the requirements on the information they must reveal about a treatment’s side effects.
In his directive, Trump cited the power of the FDA—vested by Congress in 1962—to regulate drug advertisements, ensuring they provide balanced information on benefits and risks of products.
In a separate announcement parallel to the presidential memorandum, the FDA revealed that it was cracking down on deceptive drug advertising and was sending “thousands” of letters warning companies to remove their “misleading” ads. The FDA also said that it issued roughly 100 “cease-and-desist” letters to companies that run deceptive ads.
“For far too long, these ads have distorted the doctor/patient relationship and have created artificial demand for medications regardless of their clinical appropriateness,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., said in a social media post on Tuesday night.
Online pharmacies, which "have been increasingly promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all,” were among the companies that received the letters, Makary said.
The FDA added that it was working to close the “adequate provision” policy from 1997, which triggered the flood of TV ads.
“Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” Kennedy said in the release. “We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising. Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
(Excerpt) Read more at fiercepharma.com ...
The network news programs get 90% of their revenue from Big Pharma advertising.
That’s why they don’t tell the truth about Big Pharma.
This will go nowhere.
We already have court decisions that ruled
lawyers have “free speech” to advertise.
Limit? I remember when it was illegal!
With TV Drug Ads, What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get
What I would like to see is a revision of what they can say and show. Instead of them walking along a beach or through an outdoor market or dancing or whatever while in the background they talk about the number of ways it will maim or kill you, I’d like to have those ways in the foreground, showing the person throwing up, their hair falling out in clumps, the open boils on their skin, them losing their hearing etc while a little window is in the corner showing them dancing or whatever.
They try to keep you fixated on how great your life will be on the drug while hoping you aren’t listening to the dozens of ways it will put you in the hospital or kill you. And how many say after the list of possible side effects are done, ... and more! Like you won a prize!
As a retired clinical pharmacist I support this 100% if it is legal. Does it cross the Free Speech clause? I do not know.
I do know that the vast majority of the public have no idea about which is the best drug for their illness and if cheaper alternatives will work for them. Should you believe Pfizer, MSD, Glaxo Smith Klein French now GSK etc. or your doctor? Big Pharma spent 14 billion on direct advertisement to the public in 2023. I suggest you believe your doctor.
Oddly when I was a new pharmacist I believed the major drug companies studies and publications. Would Pfizer lie to me? Yes they would! Oddly they lie via withholding data that is adverse in their research trials. That is a scientific lie and violates established protocols of honest research. They also manipulate the protocols of the study to lessen the reporting of adverse reactions Thus they get drugs approved by the FDA, which is corrupt, that should never have been approved.
I look forward to the day that big pharma is sued into bankruptcy. They have great researchers of great merit. If sued into bankruptcy other business’s will buy it and those great researchers will continue to work and discover great breakthroughs in medicine.
They can say it is perfectly legal for drug companies to speak, but it is illegal for the TV networks to sell them add time. The TV networks are not engaged in speech when they sell time to advertisers, and they remain free themselves to say whatever they want to say.
It is a conundrum...
Tobacco ads are banned...
(tobacco may have been an agreement from the producers, not sure)
Lawyer ads are allowed...
(lawyers won court decisions on “free speech”)
Alcohol ads are restricted...
(you can show it, pour it, look at it, smell it, but not drink it)
This could destroy MSNBC.
90%?
Well, I am not so sure it is 90%, but, certainly the media, even conservative talk radio, is saturated with ads for meds. If that gets cut back, there is going to be some serious howling.
I do make the concession that many of these ads seem to be 1/2 or more about potential harmful side effects. In almost every case I can think of, even when there might be some benefit to me, at the end of the ad, I am left thinking the “cure” is worse than the problem it supposedly addresses.
:-(
Drug ads are 15-20% of the revenue of the Legacy Media.
It’s their largest revenue source.
This reliance is a large part of why they were on board with the Covid shot BS and so anti-FDA reform.
On a related front, maybe food product commercials should include "fine print" recitals - you know, list of ingredients, amount of sugar and salt, "eat responsibly. We don't want you to look like Chris Christie....."
Bought f’n time. Just about every ad on TV is a drug for some other made up disease or a drug for every aspect of every minute of your life.
Insanity.
Big Pharma has spent tens of millions on advertising during NFL games.
Pfizer signed Travis Kelce to a $20 million deal.
Hopefully it will suck to be all of them.
It gets worse.
Sone ads are do short they just say talk to your doc about drug whatever.
No mention of what the drug is supposed to be treating.
But you’re supposed to ask your doc about it.
Direct to consumer should he banned.
Period.
Jeez...
Some ads are so short...
And now that I think about it, I’m wondering of health systems have a deal with Big Pharma so that both profit if a patient does just that...
Comes in an asks about a particular drug without knowing what it’s for and leaves with a scrip for it anyway.
🤬
Yep - and then a happy sounding female voice lists some of the deadly effects like she’s reading a n ice cream menu - and finishes with a gay, “Ask your doctor if this poison is right for you”...
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