President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is expected to push to ban TV advertising for prescription drugs — but Big Pharma won’t go down without a fight.
Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a known critic of the pharmaceutical industry and has repeatedly called for a ban on TV drug ads.
“One of the things I’m going to advise Donald Trump to do in order to correct the chronic disease epidemic is to ban pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” Kennedy said in a video posted on the social media site X in November.
In May, while running for president himself, Kennedy pledged to issue an executive order on his first day in office to ban pharma ads on TV. He claimed that ad spending influenced media companies to provide favorable coverage of the industry.
Elon Musk, who the president-elect appointed to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, also backs a ban. “No advertising for pharma,” Musk wrote on X in November.
During his first term, Trump’s administration attempted to regulate drug commercials by requiring them to disclose a drug’s price, but a judge blocked the move, ruling that it lacked the necessary authority from Congress.
Past efforts to regulate these ads have faced additional legal challenges, often over First Amendment concerns.
Prescription drug advertising on U.S. television exploded in the late 1990s after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxed its guidelines. Drug companies were now allowed to emphasize a drug’s benefits with only a brief summary of side effects.
Today, the U.S. remains one of only two high-income countries — New Zealand being the other — that does not strictly regulate direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads.
These ads are thriving more than ever. The pharmaceutical industry is projected to spend over $5 billion on national TV advertisements this year, the New York Times reported citing data from from iSpot.TV, a company that measures TV impressions.
The American Medical Association called for a ban on drug ads directly targeting patients back in 2015. The group expressed concerns that the increasing number of ads was fueling demand for expensive treatments, even when more affordable alternatives with similar clinical effectiveness were available.
A study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that drugmakers spent significantly more on consumer advertising for medications with lower added benefits. On average, these drugs received 14.3 percentage points more of the promotional budget compared to drugs offering higher added benefits.
These ads help Big Pharma make big money.
Among the most heavily advertised drugs in 2023 was AbbVie’s immunology drug, Skyrizi, for which the company spent over $579 million on advertising. That same year, Skyrizi generated about $7.7 billion in sales — that’s 13 times its advertising spend.
Novo Nordisk also spent $187.4 million on ads for its blockbuster diabetes medication Ozempic in 2023. The GLP-1 treatment, widely known for its weight-loss benefits, brought in $14 billion in sales for the Danish pharmaceutical giant — 74 times its ad-spend.
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