To the Editor:
Re “Trump’s Picks Want Pharmaceutical Ads Off TV” (entrance web page, Dec. 27):
There’s nearly nothing I agree with on the subject of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however I’ve been towards TV drug advertisements since they started.
They inform you how nice the drug is, then inform a lot of the negative effects, which ought to show potential customers away. They inform you to inform your physician in case you have explicit illnesses, which “your” physician ought to already know.
The advertisements are very elaborate and expensive. That cash could possibly be higher used to scale back the price of the medicine.
There’s no excuse for the federal authorities to not finish drug advertisements. The federal government did it with cigarettes. If Washington actually needs to scale back drug costs, ending the advertisements could be an efficient technique to begin.
Marshall Cossman
Grand Blanc, Mich.
To the Editor:
Your article highlights the perennial debate over pharmaceutical promoting however leaves some prescriptions unfilled.
First, it overlooks the brand new frontier: social media influencers. Pharmaceutical firms are more and more infiltrating TikTok and Instagram feeds with “affected person influencers,” blurring the road between private anecdotes and covert promoting. This intelligent tactic skirts First Modification defenses whereas leaving sufferers questioning if their neighbor’s miracle story is real or sponsored by Massive Pharma.
Second, whereas TV advertisements contribute to overmedication, the systemic forces driving this pattern are ignored. Direct-to-consumer advertisements are a symptom of a well being care system that prioritizes “extra tablets, much less prevention.” Banning TV advertisements would possibly cut back visibility, however content material will inevitably migrate to streaming platforms or podcasts.
Lastly, the declare by Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s choose to guide the Federal Communications, that People are “manner, manner too overmedicated” lacks nuance. Some advertisements promote needed care, like vaccines for seniors. It’s not all Ozempic jingles and side-effect disclaimers. As a substitute of silencing advertisements, we’d like rigorous regulation and public well being campaigns that outshine the glint of celeb endorsements.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposal is daring, however treating the symptom gained’t remedy the illness. Let’s goal for reforms guaranteeing transparency and higher well being outcomes — not simply quieter screens.
Y. Tony Yang
Washington
The author is a professor of well being coverage at The George Washington College.
To the Editor:
I agree with prohibiting direct-to-consumer TV drug advertisements. I’ve practiced inner medication for 40 years, and my principal concern with this type of promotion is that it results in a speedy and widespread escalation of the usage of new medicine that aren’t essentially higher than comparable generic medicine already in use, are actually extra expensive and are usually not adequately safety-tested in the actual world.
The premarket testing of latest medicine for efficacy and security sometimes entails just a few thousand topics. When new medicine are broadly prescribed to doubtlessly hundreds of thousands of sufferers, partly fueled by any such promoting, severe and generally lethal antagonistic negative effects grow to be obvious that weren’t seen within the premarket testing.
A extra managed introduction of a brand new drug into the final inhabitants, with out TV drug advertisements, would prioritize affected person security over company revenue.
Mark R. Goldstein
Paoli, Pa.
To the Editor:
Drug advertisements on TV are so ubiquitous that they make one lengthy for detergent or cereal advertisements to interrupt the monotony. If the incoming administration can take away this visible and aural air pollution from our house screens, it should earn the lasting gratitude of the viewing public.
John A. Rudy
Cooperstown, N.Y.
The Abuses Inside Prisons
To the Editor:
Re “14 Prison Workers in New York Are Fired Over Deadly Attack on Inmate” (information article, Dec. 25):
For the previous six years, we’ve got been volunteers with the Alliance of Households for Justice, a company that helps, empowers and mobilizes relations of incarcerated folks and their allies. In the midst of weekly organizing conferences with relations, we’ve got heard innumerable tales of jail violence: folks’s incarcerated family members being overwhelmed by guards or thrown into solitary for complaining about jail situations, some disadvantaged of meals, others denied pressing medical or psychological well being care, amongst different types of abuse.
Visiting relations have additionally been repeatedly humiliated. Ladies have been compelled to take off their bras and had canine proper up of their crotches whereas guards appeared on. They’ve been denied entry after they refused to undergo an X-ray machine that they’re legally entitled to refuse. Quite a few relations have taken break day from work and pushed 5 hours to an upstate jail solely to be denied the appropriate to go to as a result of a skirt was too quick or they had been sporting the fallacious sort of footwear.
It has grow to be solely clear to us that each side of the system is supposed to demean and dehumanize incarcerated folks and their households. The deadly beating on the Marcy Correctional Facility is in no way unimaginable. The one factor that’s completely different about it’s that it was caught on video.
We’re not speaking about a couple of unhealthy apples in a usually well-functioning system, however an orchard that’s rotten to the core.
Judith Plaskow
Martha Ackelsberg
New York
Ms. Plaskow is professor emerita of spiritual research at Manhattan Faculty. Ms. Ackelsberg is professor emerita of presidency and ladies’s and gender research at Smith Faculty.
Tales of Miracles
To the Editor:
Re “The Gift of an Expectation-Free Christmas,” by Rachel Louise Snyder (Opinion visitor essay, Dec. 25):
I nodded in settlement with the conclusion Ms. Snyder reached in her poignant essay in regards to the Christmas night time she unexpectedly spent with strangers 1000’s of miles from house a couple of days after her father’s loss of life.
“All of us had our personal histories and tragedies that had led us to that unusual and exquisite place,” she wrote, an expertise that shocked her as a result of it captured the actual essence of the vacation with out counting on the standard expectations and obligations we affiliate with Christmas.
About 40 years in the past, once I was a reporter for a big California newspaper, my editor advised me to “discover some miracles on thirty fourth Road” for a vacation season-themed story. The task would require me to go door-to-door on our thirty fourth Road. I used to be skeptical, as a result of I assumed nobody would need to discuss to a stranger, and in the event that they did, few if any would have something notably novel or fascinating to say, a lot much less one thing that certified as a miracle.
I couldn’t have been extra fallacious, on all counts.
Everybody invited me into their house, keen to speak. Every household shared a narrative they thought to be life-changing, one thing they thought-about their very own personal miracle. No two had been alike. By the top of the day, I had stuffed two yellow authorized pads to the brim.
All of us have tales to share, if somebody will simply hear.
Greg Joseph
Solar Metropolis, Ariz.
