Big Pharma Panics After RFK Makes Major Vow To Ban Industry’s Key Tool

Drugmakers have been rattled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head U.S. Health and Human Services, and his past promises to reform the way pharmaceutical giants market their products to consumers, with some industry voices ramping up speculation that he will ban a key tool in their arsenal.

The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow Big Pharma to run direct-to-consumer television advertisements, a strategy that has given the industry some of its biggest boon years before the pandemic. Kennedy, a fierce critic of the practice, is on the precipice of being tasked with regulating the industry, a possibility that has company executives sounding the alarm about what his confirmation by the Senate would mean for their bottom line. Those conversations began in earnest late last month when one industry analyst predicted that a ban on DTC marketing would represent the “biggest threat” to profit margins in decades, the Daily Caller reported.

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Research firm Intron Health said the normally robust profit margins of new drugs would have to be anticipated as scaled-back shells of themselves under a Kennedy HHS, forcing pharmaceutical companies to rethink their approach to investing in cutting-edge medicines and therapies. “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 US government to ban DTC advertising of drugs,” Intron wrote, according to Fierce Pharma. “We see this as the biggest imminent threat from RFK and the new Trump administration.”

Because the return on DTC drug marketing is quite high — “estimates ranging as high as 100%-500%, depending on the drug”— drug companies will “almost certainly” take a hit on drug marketing even if they scale back the size and scope of their campaigns. To be sure, Kennedy would face intense pushback and court challenges by well-financed lawyers for Big Pharma who would argue that a DTC ban infringes on companies’ First Amendment rights.

It remains to be seen whether Kennedy, a self-described health nut, trains his agency’s focus on instituting healthy living among Americans by reforming oversight of national food and nutrition policy or instead goes after entire industries or institutions. The black sheep of the storied Kennedy clan has made clear his disdain for Pharma’s advertising strategies, saying it dupes Americans into taking medicines that are unnecessary or counterproductive.

“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 late October while participating in Tucker Carlson’s nationwide tour in Glendale, Arizona. “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.”

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