The Trump administration is touting letters the Food and Drug Administration just sent to 100 pharmaceutical companies, accusing them of misleading direct-to-consumer advertising. Would you like to know which ads are misleading, how they are misleading, which companies received letters, and which drugs are at issue? Lol, you cannot, because while the FDA and the White House are proudly waving these letters around, they contain literally no details.
The letters order pharmaceutical companies to cease and desist their misleading ads and “remove any noncompliant advertising and bring all promotional communications into compliance.” There’s also some fearmongering about social media and some vague threats about how “going forward, FDA intends to take aggressive action and ensure conformity with the law.”
What the letters don’t include is any explanation of what constitutes “noncompliant advertising,” either generally or specifically. There’s no reference to any laws or regulations, nor are the letters tailored to specific companies and specific advertisements. Pharmaceutical companies are apparently just supposed to guess at what they’re doing wrong and fix it, or face some as-yet-unknown consequences.
Related | RFK Jr.’s plan to ‘Make Our Children Healthy Again’ is another miss
While you do not, under any circumstances, have to give the benefit of the doubt to Big Pharma, Trump’s attack has nothing to do with actual, genuine concerns about deceptive advertising. Rather, this is about forcing pharmaceutical companies to treat Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories as if they were science.
In the FDA’s press release about the ads, Kennedy complained that “Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs” and that “only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
Hmm. Apparently “radical transparency” does not involve telling the pharmaceutical companies or the rest of the country what the problems are.
Kennedy, who is genuinely unhinged about this sort of thing, has said he wants to ban pharmaceutical advertising altogether. There is certainly a case to be made that direct-to-consumer advertising is problematic, but these letters don’t even pretend to make that case.
In part, that’s because these chest-thumping letters look nothing like actual regulations that companies are obliged to follow. During the Biden administration, we got things like this 84-page rule about “Presenting Quantitative Efficacy and Risk Information in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Promotional Labeling and Advertisements.” It included references to the governing laws, lengthy definitions, multiple examples of compliant and noncompliant advertising, disclosure requirements for social media influencers, and more. Or here is a lengthy guide for pharmaceutical companies about “Presenting Quantitative Efficacy and Risk Information in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Promotional Labeling and Advertisements.”
The problem here is that Kennedy doesn’t believe in science. He’s an ideologue hell-bent on blaming every childhood illness, every chronic health condition, on the evilness of Big Pharma, and he’s absolutely furious that no actual scientists agree. Kennedy’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report meanders from complaint to complaint about fluoride, vaccines, and prescription drugs, but without any studies or references to governing laws. It’s just a laundry list of Kennedy’s favorite conspiracies.
Related | RFK Jr. is so mad that real doctors don’t have to listen to him
Science, under Kennedy, consists of demanding that major medical publications retract a study he doesn’t like, even when that study was conducted outside of the United States and did not receive U.S. government funding. This is comic book villain stuff, not actual regulation.
What these fact-free letters are really about is signaling to pharmaceutical companies that they are in for the same treatment as universities and media companies: vague, unsupported assertions of wrongdoing that can only be resolved by giving the administration millions of dollars. And that sure doesn’t look like science.