Online chatter has indicated that there would be broad support for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to fulfill a campaign promise and long-time ambition to ban pharmaceutical corporations from advertising their products on television.
"One of the things I'm going to advise Donald Trump to do to correct the chronic disease epidemic is to ban pharmaceutical advertising on TV. Only two countries in the world allow pharmaceutical advertising on the airwaves... And we have the highest disease rate, and we buy more drugs, and they're more expensive than anywhere in the world," RFK Jr. said during an appearance with Tucker Carlson in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Since the 1980s and accelerating significantly in the 1990s, pharmaceutical advertising on the airwaves has grown into a runaway juggernaut. According to figures from ISpot.TV, pharmaceutical ads accounted for half of ad spending in 2024 on the five most popular nightly news programs on major networks. The pharma giants spent an incredible $4 billion on advertising in 2023, which has only been trending upward since then. Adweek has reported that pharmaceutical companies spent over $5.3 billion in local and national TV advertising from Jan. to Oct. 2024, a 10% increase from the previous year, and accounted for between 10 and 12 percent of overall TV ad buys.
Primarily targeted toward the elderly and the desperate, pharmaceutical advertisements are among the most exploitative pieces of ad content in existence. Every ad tells the public that happiness is only a pill or an injection away at a time when the masses are more isolated, divided, and broken than ever before. Rather than focus on fixing underlying societal, cultural, or personal problems, the pharmaceutical solution is always to create new customers and keep them on the hook for treatments, as a cure would mean a lower profit margin, which would be wholly unacceptable to the shareholders.
Instead of doctors prescribing medications based on need, potential patients are implored through advertisements to seek out drugs based on the content they have consumed. The laundry list of side effects for these drugs is sometimes laughable, dwarfing the negative consequences of whatever condition the medication is supposed to be treating. Social contagions such as transgenderism are fostered by pharmaceutical companies that wish to sell hormone blockers and other gender-related treatments to the public, targeting even children with demented propaganda to maximize revenue.
The obesity epidemic has also created a massive market for pharmaceutical exploitation. New 'miracle' weight loss cures are all the rage as diabetes-maintenance drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy are being abused and causing people to waste away. The likes of Oprah Winfrey are billing a pharma-induced anorexia of sorts as a "weight loss revolution." Those who choose these drugs over proper diet and exercise to lose weight will likely have to take them forever, which could cause horrible unintended consequences that will only be discovered after it is too late. Such mass insanity would have been unthinkable before Big Pharma saturated its ads on television, but now it is the status quo, and only getting worse.
Undoubtedly, there will be opponents of Secretary Kennedy's alleged idea to ban on pharma ads who will argue that his crackdown is against the free market and, therefore, not conservative. However, the demand for drugs is far from free, and pharmaceutical corporations have gamed it for generations. Big Pharma captured regulatory agencies like the FDA that were supposed to keep them in check long ago. Pharmaceutical corporations wrote millions of dollars in checks to Congress to ensure compliance. This market is effectively rigged against free enterprise and honest competition in favor of corporate hegemony.
A ban would be a way to level the playing field in a similar manner as President Trump's tariffs are being used. Trump's tariffs are also criticized by free-market absolutists who believe they are taxes that hamper maximum economic efficiency. Those assertions may be correct on some level, but Trump is using the tariffs to reverse many decades of damage to the American economy. Secretary Kennedy is similarly using the tools at his disposal to remedy damage to public health that has destroyed millions of lives. Allowing the so-called free market to solve this problem will not work, considering how entrenched the pharma colossus has become within society.
While it may be just a rumor for now, a facilitated plan to ban pharmaceutical ads will represent a significant triumph for the Trump administration. Trump's willingness to take on Big Pharma will make him unlike any president in modern history. Kennedy would be forging a Teddy Roosevelt-like populism separating him from other chief executives of the era, putting the Republican Party on a trajectory for success. Trump's Republican Party, looking out for the working class and standing up against corporate overreach, will bring in disaffected independents and moderates and keep them around for generations to come. Taking on Big Pharma in this way would be a moral and ethical victory and a masterstroke of political maneuvering.
