Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the power to stop pharmaceutical companies from advertising directly to consumers. He could do it almost instantaneously by revising the ’90s-era guidance giving drugmakers the opening to run 30-second TV ads on their products.

However, the Department of Health and Human Services is taking a different approach — one that indicates the matter is not as high on the Trump administration’s priority list as Kennedy told his supporters.

The Food and Drug Administration has posted its intent to require drugmakers to disclose all risk and safety information within ads instead of directing consumers to an external source — a way to effectively end television and radio drug ads by rendering them untenably long, experts say.

The push is through the traditional regulatory process. A senior administration official told NOTUS that the rule is “on the priority list” but there is no firm timeline to get it enacted.

“I don’t take it seriously at all,” Lars Noah, a law professor at the University of Florida who focuses on pharmaceutical regulation, said of Kennedy’s pledge to ban drug commercials.

Two days before the 2024 general election, Kennedy promised to halt the prescription drug ads millions of Americans see on their screens every day.

“Let’s get President Trump back in the White House and me to DC so we can ban pharmaceutical advertising,” he wrote on X.

Last September, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum ordering HHS to go after pharmaceutical advertising. Forcing drug companies to report all the side effects in their advertisements “might create an advertisement that’s four minutes long,” Kennedy said at the time. The FDA also sent letters to dozens of pharmaceutical companies ordering them to either halt or revise ads the agency considers misleading.

RFK Jr.’s Big Promise to Ban Pharmaceutical Ads Is in the Slow Lane - NOTUS