President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is reportedly rattling drugmakers in light of Kennedy’s prior calls to ban pharmaceutical advertising.

This from msn.com.

If confirmed by the Senate to serve as HHS secretary, Kennedy could marshal the country’s public health agencies to implement his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) priorities, leading one pharmaceutical industry observer to claim that Kennedy is likely to attempt a ban on direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising.

However, drugmakers would almost certainly challenge such a ban on First Amendment grounds and Kennedy may lack the support of Trump and Republican lawmakers who have so far refrained from commenting on this proposal.

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Kennedy said to thunderous applause during a Tucker Carlson Live Tour event in Glendale, Arizona, on Oct. 31:

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.

There’s only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on the airwaves. One of them is New Zealand and the other is us and we have the highest disease rate, and we buy more drugs and they’re more expensive than anywhere in the world.

According to analysis from MediaRadar:

Spending on DTC pharmaceutical advertising in the United States ballooned to more than $7 billion in 2023, with ad buys on weight loss and diabetes drugs surpassing $1 billion for the first time.

United Kingdom-based research firm Intron Health wrote in a report excerpted by FiercePharma, a pharmaceutical industry-focused news outlet:

Whilst we have a relatively benign view of RFK’s impact on the Pharma industry, one thing that does worry us is the potential for the U.S. government to ban DTC advertising of drugs.

We see this as the biggest imminent threat from RFK and the new Trump administration.

Kennedy could wield considerable influence over the second Trump administration’s approach to pharmaceutical advertising since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—the chief regulator of the pharmaceutical industry’s advertisements—is housed within HHS.

The Biden FDA issued new guidelines on DTC advertising that went into effect on May 20, requiring advertising to state drugs’ side effects and medication risks in a “clear, conspicuous, and neutral manner.” Kennedy called for a review of these guidelines in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 5.

During his run for president and as a Trump campaign surrogate, Kennedy claimed that media outlets who receive substantial ad revenue from pharmaceutical companies cannot report on Big Pharma with objectivity.

According to a statement on Kennedy’s website:

The primary purpose of pharmaceutical advertising is not to influence consumers, but rather the television networks and news itself.

It gives Big Pharma the power to dictate what goes on the news—and what doesn’t—because the networks won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

Kennedy’s website also claims:

Every other country in the world recognizes that pharma ads represent a threat to the public good.

Kennedy’s concern that mainstream media has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry to buy news outlets’ silence on scrutinizing drugmakers in exchange for ad revenue has been embraced by influential voices in the MAHA movement and other Trump allies.

Calley Means, a Kennedy advisor and MAHA advocate, told Tucker Carlson during an interview on Feb 2:

The news ad spending from pharma is a public relations lobbying tactic, essentially to buy off the news.

The news is not investigating pharma.

In response to a post alleging a correlation between the growth of pharmaceutical advertising and rising media bias, Elon Musk wrote on X on Nov. 19:

No advertising for pharma.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, has also argued that media organizations that rake in pharmaceutical advertising revenue should face increased scrutiny when reporting on public health matters. Bhattacharya was notably blacklisted by Twitter before Musk bought the platform over his criticism of the medical establishment’s lockdown approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bhattacharya wrote on X on May 30, 2023:

Another argument against direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies: Because of DTC ads, drug companies like Pfizer hold a vice grip on the editorial policies of conventional American media, which can ill afford to lose the advertising money.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a general surgeon and senior fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute wrote in a statement following Trump’s nomination of Kennedy to serve as HHS secretary:

His calls to ban pharmaceutical advertising violate the First Amendment right to freely share and exchange information, including scientific information, and infringe on the individual right to self-medicate.

Kennedy’s call to ban DTC pharmaceutical advertising will certainly not receive communist/globalist support and it is likely as well to face skepticism from “Republican lawmakers who have traditionally preferred a deregulatory approach to the pharmaceutical industry.”