U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., testifies earlier than a Senate Finance Committee listening to on President Donald Trump’s 2026 well being care agenda, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum that goals to crack down on direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads, in a transfer that stops wanting an outright ban.
The pharmaceutical trade’s capability to promote medicine instantly to shoppers has lengthy been a goal of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who floated a ban on these ads in November and has argued that they lead Americans to use extra prescription medicines. But senior administration officers on Tuesday mentioned the brand new memorandum goes past drugmakers and conventional TV promoting by additionally focusing on ads on social media and digital platforms.
The measure directs Kennedy and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary to take actions to guarantee transparency and accuracy in drug promoting, together with by growing the quantity of knowledge associated to any product dangers, officers mentioned.
“Our goal is to ensure that patients have proper information about drugs that have potential harms, and it’s to rebuild public trust,” one official mentioned, including that the administration plans to use current rules on ads quite than search new guidelines.
The Trump administration will ship out round 100 cease-and-desist enforcement letters and hundreds of warning letters alerting firms that the federal government plans to implement present rules round these ads, the officers instructed reporters. The administration additionally plans to scrutinize social media firms in addition to influencers paid to promote pharmaceutical merchandise with out correct disclosures or with out following the foundations that drugmakers should observe, in accordance to the officers.
“There has been broad frustration with the increasing prevalence of these ads creating a misleading impression, specifically not disclosing side effects appropriately – ads that have encroached now into social media without proper disclosures, and ads of online pharmacies that are not following the same rules that many pharmaceutical companies follow,” one official instructed reporters.
The Trump administration won’t publish the letters it’s sending out, however “we can certainly look at doing that,” one official mentioned. The official mentioned no firm stood out as a serious perpetrator.
But they famous that senators earlier this 12 months wrote a letter to the FDA a few Hims & Hers Super Bowl advert in February that promoted weight reduction medicine from its on-line pharmacy “with really no mention of any potential harms.”
“That certainly caught a lot of people’s eyes,” the official mentioned.
The administration additionally plans to get rid of what officers known as a “loophole” from a 1997 FDA motion, which allowed drug ads to refer shoppers to one other supply, similar to a web site, for full info on a pharmaceutical product’s unwanted effects or potential dangers. Before that motion, the FDA established strict pointers for TV drug promoting in 1985, requiring that they embody the entire drug’s attainable unwanted effects if they need to point out the situation the product is meant to deal with.
One official mentioned enforcement has faltered lately, so the Trump administration is “going to take these regulations seriously and respond to the call from physicians.” Officials mentioned many U.S. physicians do not consider drug ads comprise balanced info, and argue that they will distort their relationships with sufferers.
One official added that just a few massive pharmaceutical firm CEOs have instructed the administration to take motion on drug promoting, with out disclosing the names of particular companies.
The memorandum comes after the discharge of a report from Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” fee on Tuesday, which says HHS, the FDA, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will ramp up oversight and enforcement of prescription drug promoting legal guidelines. Violations “demonstrating harm” will probably be prioritized, together with by social media influencers and direct-to-consumer telehealth firms.
Trump tried to rein in pharmaceutical trade promoting throughout his first time period, issuing a regulation in 2019 that will have required drugmakers to embody their checklist costs in TV ads. A federal choose nixed that effort, saying HHS had overstepped its authority.
Drug promoting has taken off because the FDA relaxed guidelines round drug promoting in 1997. Pharma advertisers spent greater than $10 billion on prescription drug ads final 12 months, in accordance to several reports citing MediaRadar information. The high 10 medicines have been chargeable for a few third of that spending in 2024.