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The Trump administration is cracking down on pharmaceutical ads that target consumers directly. Senior officials say enforcement of existing regulations has been lax. They want to change that. NPR pharmaceuticals correspondent Sydney Lupkin has this report.
SYDNEY LUPKIN, BYLINE: The president signed a memo Tuesday to ramp up Food and Drug Administration enforcement and curb some direct-to-consumer drug ads. According to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, the administration wants to close a loophole that allowed advertisers to skip detailing the full risks of a drug in an advertisement. Dr. Caleb Alexander, a drug policy researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the ads have long been a source of controversy.
CALEB ALEXANDER: Many clinicians and public health professionals have been wondering for years and years when something was going to be done about it.
LUPKIN: He says it may be popular on both sides of the aisle, but there are limits to what the Trump or any administration can do.
ALEXANDER: Our laws and rules and regulations governing drug promotion were written in a different era. And I don't think that they contemplated a world where so many Americans would be getting so much information from social media, nor did they contemplate the presence of these increasingly powerful telemedicine and online health platforms that are undertaking direct marketing themselves.
LUPKIN: In a background briefing, a senior Trump administration official mentioned a Super Bowl ad by a telehealth company for compounded weight-loss drugs as an example of one that didn't properly disclose risks. But Alexander says the ad is probably beyond the scope of the current laws and regulations. To change that, he says, would take an act of Congress. In addition to the memo, the Trump administration says the FDA is sending out a slew of enforcement letters to companies about their drug ads.
Sydney Lupkin, NPR News.
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