Short Takes #8 Heavily Advertised Drugs and Costs
Pharmaceutical Advertisements Are Taking Over Cable/Network TV, Especially at "News" Rooms Like Fox
#1: 10 Most Expensive Brand Drugs in the U.S. (And Most Advertised..)
The following are the 10 most expensive, popular, brand-name drugs. Reported prices are based on the cash price at the pharmacy — the so-called “usual and customary” price. (They don’t include insurance copayments or coinsurance payments.)
MONTHLY COSTS From July 2021 (Source: GoodRx from July 2021)
Humira $9,065
Cosentyx $8,907
Enbrel $8,717
Otezla $6,193
Dupixent $5,298
Biktarvy $4,083
Genvoya $4,061
Descovy $2,195
Tivicay $2,150
Latuda $1,604
Now you can see WHY there are Ads Everywhere on TV for these drugs. THEY’RE EXPENSIVE to the end consumer! They are expensive TO PAY FOR TV ADVERTISEMENTS! Duh!
#2: 70% of Heavily Advertised Drugs Have 'Low Therapeutic Value'
From a JAMA Study and ARS Technica:
You’re being sold expensive, heavily advertised products that have little therapeutic effect!
From ARSTechnica:
Of the top advertised drugs, 73 had at least one value rating. Collectively, pharmaceutical companies spent $22.3 billion on advertising for those 73 drugs between 2015 and 2021. Even with the generous ratings, 53 of the 73 drugs (roughly 73 percent) were categorized as low-benefit. Collectively, these low-benefit drugs accounted for $15.9 billion of the ad spending. The top three low-benefit drugs by dollar amount were Dulaglutide (type 2 diabetes) “Trulicity,” Varenicline (smoking cessation) “Chantix,” and Tofacitinib (rheumatoid arthritis) “Xeljianx.”
From the same JAMA Study:
Also see USNews; “Less Than a Third of Heavily Advertised Drugs Have 'High Therapeutic Value': Study”
#3: Pharma Are The Biggest Advertisers On TV: Most Adverts On Prime-Time and Cable News (like Fox)
From Brandon Smith at End of the American Dream May 1, 2023:
According to Adweek, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than 400 million dollars on national television advertising during the month of March alone… AND $6.88 BILLION PER YEAR
The Cable and Network News Connection
During the 18 months that stretched from the beginning of 2020 to the middle of 2021, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than 2 billion dollars “on ads during primetime cable news”…
Over two billion dollars ($2.2B) were spent on ads during primetime cable news (5 pm until midnight on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) and nightly network news programming on ABC, CBS, and NBC between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Fox News earned the most in advertising ($622M) and CBS earned the least ($205M).
Please pay special attention to that last sentence. Fox News received more money from Big Pharma during that period than anyone else. So if any Fox News hosts were to be highly critical of the pharmaceutical industry, that would put hundreds of millions of dollars at risk.
But that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did less than a week before he was fired.
He delivered a blistering monologue in which he revealed the truth about the damage that the industry is doing and the influence that it has over the big news networks…
Personally, I believe that this is one of the primary reasons why he was fired.