Trump administration weighs crackdown on pharma ads, Bloomberg says

The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, Rachel Cohrs Zhang of Bloomberg reports. Banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so the Trump administration is instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, people familiar with the plans told Bloomberg. The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad, likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive, or removing the industry’s ability to deduct direct-to-consumer advertising as a business expense for tax purposes, sources told the journalist. Publicly traded companies in the pharma space include AstraZeneca (AZN), Bristol Myers (BMY), Eli Lilly (LLY), GSK (GSK), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Merck (MRK), Novartis (NVS), Pfizer (PFE), Roche (RHHBY) and Sanofi (SNY).