The Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., testifies to an audience of the Senate Finance Committee on the Medical Care Agenda of President Donald Trump on the Medical Care Agenda of 2026, in Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA. UU., September 4, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
President Donald Trump signed on Tuesday a memorandum that aims to take energetic measures against advertisements of direct prescription drugs to the consumer, in a movement that stops an absolute prohibition.
The ability of the pharmaceutical industry to announce drugs directly to consumers has long been the objective of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who raised a prohibition of these ads in November and has argued that they lead Americans to use more prescribed medications. But the senior administration officials said Tuesday that the new memorandum goes beyond drug manufacturers and traditional television advertising by also going to advertisements on social networks and digital platforms.
The measure orders the Commissioner for Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary, to take measures to guarantee transparency and precision in drug advertising, even by increasing the amount of information related to any product risk, officials said.
“Our goal is to ensure that patients have adequate information about medications that have potential damage, and is to rebuild public trust,” said an official, added that the administration plans to use existing regulations in ads instead of looking for new rules.
The Trump administration will send around 100 letters of execution of cessation and withdrawal and thousands of warning letters warning companies that the Government plans to enforce the current regulations around those ads, officials told journalists. The administration also plans to analyze social media companies, as well as the influencers paid to promote pharmaceutical products without adequate revelations or without following the rules that medication manufacturers must follow, according to officials.
“There has been wide frustration with the growing prevalence of these ads that create a misleading impression, specifically that they do not reveal the side effects in an appropriate way: ads that have now invaded social networks without adequate revelations and advertisements of online pharmacies that do not follow the same rules as many pharmaceutical companies follow,” said one of the officers.
The Trump administration will not publish the letters you are sending, but “we can certainly consider doing that,” said an official. The official said that no company stood out as an important perpetrator.
But they noticed that the senators earlier this year wrote a letter to the FDA on a Hims and hers The announcement of the Super Bowl in February that promoted medications to lose weight of its pharmacy online “without mentioning any potential damage.”
“That certainly caught many people,” said the official.
The administration also plans to eliminate what officials called a “escape” of an action of the 1997 FDA, which allowed drug ads to refer consumers to another source, such as a website, to obtain complete information on the side effects or the potential risks of a pharmaceutical product. Before that action, the FDA established strict guidelines for drug advertising on television in 1985, which requires that all possible side effects of the drug include if they wish to indicate the condition that the product intends to treat.
An official said that the execution has hesitated in recent years, so the Trump administration “will take these regulations seriously and respond to the call of doctors.” The authorities said that many American doctors do not believe that drug ads contain balanced information and argue that they can distort their relationships with patients.
An official added that some CEO of large pharmaceutical companies have told the Administration to take measures on drug advertising, without revealing the names of specific companies.
The memorandum occurs after the publication of a report by the “Make America America Healy Again” Commission by Tuesday, which says that HHS, the FDA, the Federal Commerce Commission and the Department of Justice will increase the supervision and application of the advertising laws of prescription drugs. Violations “demonstrating damage” will be prioritized, even by influential people in social networks and direct telesalud companies to the consumer.
Trump tried to control the advertising of the pharmaceutical industry during his first mandate, issuing a regulation in 2019 that would have required that medication manufacturers include their list prices on television ads. A federal judge rejected that effort, saying that HHS had exceeded his authority.
Drug advertising has taken off since the FDA relaxed the rules around drug advertising in 1997. Pharmaceutical advertisers spent more than $ 10 billion on prescription drug ads last year, according to several reports that cite mediarardar data. The 10 best medications were responsible for approximately one third of that expense in 2024.
