Re: All The Reasons Why Big Pharma Commercials Should Be Banned

On 2025-04-01 4:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:

Imagine that an executive of a major corporation sits down for dinner at a
restaurant. Unbeknownst to him, it’s a sting operation. Everything he says is
being recorded. Very quickly, in order to impress someone he thinks is
interested in him, the executive confesses that his company is lying to the
American public. In secret, the executive says, they’re thinking about
conducting extremely dangerous medical experiments within the borders of the
United States — and these experiments are similar to the ones in Wuhan that
led to the COVID pandemic. Then the executive admits that government
regulators aren’t scrutinizing these experiments as much as they should, for
the simple reason that they don’t want to jeopardize their potential future
job opportunities at the corporation. And then imagine that, once the
executive realizes he’s on camera and that he’s just confessed to a fraud on
the American public, he begins screaming and crawling on the floor of the
restaurant. In his hysteria, he pushes people away, tries to hide his face,
and ultimately runs away. He demonstrates a clear consciousness of guilt, in
other words.
 What do you think the end result of this kind of episode might be? In a
rational world, you might expect, at a minimum, that this executive would be
fired, and that his company would immediately be investigated — both by the
government, and by every media organization in the country. After all, it’s
not every day that a corporate executive admits that his company is working
on research that could cause another pandemic. He also just divulged trade
secrets on camera, which you’d think would upset his bosses.
 But in reality, none of those things happened.
 The situation I just described took place in early 2023, when Project Veritas
secretly filmed a senior official in Pfizer’s research and development
division. You might remember that whole episode. Pfizer came out and denied,
essentially, that the executive had meant what he said. As far as we know,
the company took no action against him. In the end, Pfizer, needless to say,
did not suffer any significant consequences. They remain one of the largest
and most profitable corporations on the planet. But incredibly, the people
who exposed the Pfizer executive didn’t fare so well. It was like Pfizer
pulled a Reverse Uno card.
 For one thing, Project Veritas did not survive. It collapsed soon afterwards.
So did the one show on cable news that covered Project Veritas’ reporting,
Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” They were taken off the air shortly after
covering the Pfizer sting operation, for reasons that remain officially
undisclosed. To restate: Less than five months after a Pfizer executive was
exposed and humiliated on camera, everyone who talked about the scandal was
deplatformed. Meanwhile the executive went back to work.
 If you wanted to illustrate the extraordinary power that the pharmaceutical
industry has in this country, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example.
One way or another, people who criticize them tend to lose their platforms.
That’s a level of protection that very few other corporations have,
regardless of their financial situation. Tesla, for example, is about ten
times the size of Pfizer by market cap. And as we all know, they’re subjected
to constant media attacks. So what is it about the pharmaceutical industry,
specifically, that makes them so hard to criticize?
 The leading theory, which we’ve talked about before, is that companies like
Pfizer essentially buy off the media. You can’t watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC
without seeing an ad from the pharmaceutical industry. In total, the
pharmaceutical industry spends something like $5 billion on advertising every
year — which in some years, is more than they spend on research and
development. And a lot of this spending is concentrated on news stations. As
the journalist Kyle Becker reported on his Substack, “Nearly 31% of ad
minutes on major nightly news broadcasts in 2024 came from pharmaceutical
brands.” If you watch any amount of cable news, you know that figure is
probably accurate. Turn the television on, and you’ll probably see one of
these ads within five minutes. These are among the most lucrative ad
purchases — pushing drugs like Ozempic, Skyrizi, “Vyvgart Hytrulo,” and so
on. Naturally, that kind of spending leads to favorable coverage. Big Pharma
doesn’t even need to establish any kind of quid pro quo, or request anything
from the news networks. It’s just generally understood that, if you’re
working for one of these networks, you should go easy on the pharma giants.
 This dynamic is one of the reasons why a lot of people took notice recently,
on hearing the news that RFK Jr. and the HHS had supposedly implemented a
total ban on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Those reports
turned out to be inaccurate, at least for the time being. But RFK Jr. has
pledged to implement a similar ban in the past. And he’s been very clear
about his reasoning. While he was campaigning for Trump last year, and while
he was leading his own presidential bid, for example, RFK Jr. made the point
that pharmaceutical advertising has compromised the news industry. He’s also
said that, in part because of these advertisements, Americans spend far more
on prescription drugs than pretty much every other major country. By some
estimates we spend more than twice as much.
 And it’s logical to conclude that advertising plays some role in those
numbers. When people see an advertisement for a new prescription drug,
they’re more likely to tell their doctor they want it, as opposed to a
cheaper generic brand. Keep in mind, only two countries on the planet allow
direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising: the United States and New
Zealand. The vast majority of the civilized world has rejected this kind of
marketing. And one of the obvious consequences of this carve-out for big
pharma is that they sell a lot more drugs to people who otherwise wouldn’t
pay for them. They wouldn’t spend $5 billion a year on advertisements if that
weren’t true. (And this isn’t even getting into Big Pharma advertisements and
solicitations that target physicians and other professionals).
 Just to give one example, in 2022, the manufacturer of the drug Skyrizie,
AbbVie, spent around $229 million advertising the drug that year. The next
year, AbbVie decided to increase its advertising budget for the drug by more
than double. And the results were clear: drug sales went up to $7.8 billion,
an increase of roughly 50% year-over-year. There was no major FDA approval
that occurred in this period. The drug’s formula didn’t change in some way.
Instead, more people heard about it, so more people asked their doctors for
it. And by the way, the vast majority of the $7.8 billion came from customers
in the United States, because they’re pretty much the only people seeing the
advertisements.
 This advertising exemption, of course, is just one of several carve-outs that
Big Pharma enjoys in this country. It’s also nearly impossible to sue them
when one of their vaccines ends up hurting or killing you, thanks to a
federal law passed three decades ago. But the advertising carve-out is one of
the most important ones, because it has a lot of downstream effects that
aren’t immediately obvious. One of those effects is that the ads increase the
price of the drugs. When billions of dollars are spent on advertising,
inevitably that cost will be passed on to the consumers. This is basic
economics and common sense, and doctors see it everyday. As far back as a
decade ago — when direct-to-consumer advertising was much less common than it
is today — the American Medical Association noticed the problem. They voted
to ban all direct-to-consumer advertising.
 The chair of the AMA, a woman named Patrice Harris, announced that, “Today’s
vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians
about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role
that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices. Direct-to-
consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs,
even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”
 It’s true that, by law, these advertisements have to list all of the
potential side effects. Invariably, they rattle them off at the end of the
commercial, and they do it so quickly that you can’t really tell what’s
happening in some cases. Pretty much everyone ignores these disclaimers at
this point, because they all end up sounding like a bizarre list of horrible
afflictions, always ending in death or paralysis or something catastrophic.
You can watch an ad for Claritin and they’ll tell you that the side effects
could include getting hit by a train or something. It’s almost as if the
drugmakers have trained us to become numb to all of these potential side
effects, and to think they’re all extremely rare and unlikely to occur.
 That’s because, even with the often comically long disclaimer at the end of
these drug commercials, the ads still don’t do enough to emphasize the
potential side effects and dangers of the drugs. They don’t discuss the
relative risk of every side effect, or how common they are, for example. And
that makes sense because ads — regardless of who’s making them — are meant to
manipulate and create an emotional response in a very short period of time.
That’s fine when you’re selling cars or clothing or whatever. But it just
shouldn’t be the way medical treatments are presented to the public. People
should consult with professionals when they’re seeking these treatments,
instead of watching paid actors sing a song about it.
 But pharmaceutical ads, by design, short-circuit this process. They allow Big
Pharma companies to sell the disease, not just the cure. They convince people
that they have such-and-such a disorder and enlist them to go to their doctor
and request the drug to treat it. This is totally backwards. You’re supposed
to go to the doctor with your symptoms, not with a wishlist of drugs you want
to receive. Pharma ads have helped to turn doctors into glorified drug
dealers. About a dozen studies bear this out. Patients who go to the doctor
and say “I saw an ad for Paxlovid” or “I saw an ad for Prozac” are a lot more
likely to get that drug, than a patient who simply presents with depression-
related symptoms. And on top of that, these advertisements have also
contributed to the perception that, whatever problem you might have — whether
it’s depression, or “feeling like you’re in the wrong body,” or whatever —
that a drug from Big Pharma can be the solution. As we’ve discussed, this is
a sentiment that has ruined the lives of thousands of people, including
children.
 Part of the reason this perception has been allowed to fester, as Liz Wheeler
pointed out the other day, is that there’s no critical reporting on Big
Pharma in the mainstream press. The pharmaceutical industry is allowed to buy
billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, which presents them as the
solution to everyone’s problems. And then the press — along with many
scientific institutions that also receive money from Big Pharma— don’t have
any incentive to contradict the narrative. If and when HHS does ban these
advertisements, then suddenly, that incentive will reappear. Very quickly,
corporate media will fail, because they’ll be deprived of most of their
advertising revenue. And in their place will be a slew of investigations by
actual journalists into the various grotesque abuses of power by the medical
establishment in recent years — on everything from gender ideology to the
COVID shot.
 As of right now, again, it appears that the reports were wrong about an
imminent ban on these direct-to-consumer advertisements. But there are
reasons to think that RFK Jr. and HHS are still planning to implement one. If
that comes to pass — and there are indicators it will — then it would
inevitably set up a major legal battle between Big Pharma and the federal
government on First Amendment grounds. They will claim that they have the
constitutional right to flood the airwaves with sales pitches for extremely
potent medications that could ruin your life. But they don’t have that right,
any more than the local drug dealer does. If RFK Jr. can win this fight, then
in one fell swoop, he will destroy the corporate press, save billions of
dollars for Americans, and usher in a new era of skepticism for an industry
that badly needs it. He would be the single most consequential HHS secretary
in the history of this country. All he needs to do is what pretty much every
country in the world is already doing, which is to tell Big Pharma to get off
our televisions.
 

Just to add one more point to the list of sins of Big Pharma, one of my biggest peeves with drug ads is that they often don't tell you what they're meant to treat!
I've seen far too many ads that have lines like "Ask your doctor if Profloxidene (a name I just invented) is right for you" when nothing previous to that line actually indicated what illness or condition could be treated by "Profloxidene". Time and time again I've had no idea if the drug was meant to help athlete's foot or cancer, sagging breasts or the runs. Personally, I'd be considerably embarrassed to go to my doctor and ask if "Profloxidene" is right for me, only to discover it was to ease menstrual cramps. If the ad actually told me that, I'd have known not to ask so stupid a question of an expensive, overworked professional. The thing I don't get is why consumers - and the clever marketing gurus who have developed these ads - haven't figured this out.
The article is exactly right: people should go to their doctors to ask about symptoms, not request specific drugs just because they'd seen it mentioned in an ad.
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Rhino