To the Editor:
Re “Trump’s Picks Need Pharmaceutical Advertisements Off TV” (entrance web page, Dec. 27):
There’s nearly nothing I agree with in the case of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however I’ve been in opposition to TV drug adverts since they started.
They let you know how nice the drug is, then inform many of the negative effects, which ought to show potential customers away. They let you know to inform your physician you probably have specific illnesses, which “your” physician ought to already know.
The adverts are very elaborate and dear. That cash could possibly be higher used to cut back the price of the medication.
There’s no excuse for the federal authorities to not finish drug adverts. The federal government did it with cigarettes. If Washington actually needs to cut back drug costs, ending the adverts can be an efficient strategy 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 corporations 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 Large Pharma.
Second, whereas TV adverts contribute to overmedication, the systemic forces driving this pattern are ignored. Direct-to-consumer adverts are a symptom of a well being care system that prioritizes “extra capsules, much less prevention.” Banning TV adverts would possibly scale 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 “approach, approach too overmedicated” lacks nuance. Some adverts promote mandatory care, like vaccines for seniors. It’s not all Ozempic jingles and side-effect disclaimers. As a substitute of silencing adverts, we want rigorous regulation and public well being campaigns that outshine the flicker of celeb endorsements.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposal is daring, however treating the symptom received’t treatment 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 adverts. I’ve practiced inner medication for 40 years, and my predominant concern with this type of promotion is that it results in a speedy and widespread escalation of using new medication that aren’t essentially higher than comparable generic medication already in use, are actually extra expensive and should not adequately safety-tested in the actual world.
The premarket testing of recent medication for efficacy and security usually entails just a few thousand topics. When new medication are extensively prescribed to probably tens of millions of sufferers, partly fueled by this kind of promoting, severe and generally lethal opposed negative effects turn into obvious that weren’t seen within the premarket testing.
A extra managed introduction of a brand new drug into the overall inhabitants, with out TV drug adverts, would prioritize affected person security over company revenue.
Mark R. Goldstein
Paoli, Pa.
To the Editor:
Drug adverts on TV are so ubiquitous that they make one lengthy for detergent or cereal adverts to interrupt the monotony. If the incoming administration can take away this visible and aural air pollution from our residence screens, it’ll earn the lasting gratitude of the viewing public.
John A. Rudy
Cooperstown, N.Y.
The Abuses Inside Prisons
To the Editor:
Re “14 Jail Employees in New York Are Fired Over Lethal Assault on Inmate” (information article, Dec. 25):
For the previous six years, we now have been volunteers with the Alliance of Households for Justice, a corporation that helps, empowers and mobilizes relations of incarcerated individuals and their allies. In the middle of weekly organizing conferences with relations, we now have heard innumerable tales of jail violence: individuals’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. Girls have been pressured 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 day without work from work and pushed 5 hours to an upstate jail solely to be denied the proper to go to as a result of a skirt was too quick or they have been carrying the incorrect sort of footwear.
It has turn into solely clear to us that each facet of the system is supposed to demean and dehumanize incarcerated individuals and their households. The deadly beating on the Marcy Correctional Facility is in no way unimaginable. The one factor that’s totally different about it’s that it was caught on video.
We’re not speaking about a number of unhealthy apples in a typically well-functioning system, however an orchard that’s rotten to the core.
Judith Plaskow
Martha Ackelsberg
New York
Ms. Plaskow is professor emerita of non secular 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 Present 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 evening she unexpectedly spent with strangers hundreds of miles from residence a number of days after her father’s dying.
“All of us had our personal histories and tragedies that had led us to that unusual and delightful 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, after I was a reporter for a big California newspaper, my editor instructed me to “discover some miracles on thirty fourth Avenue” for a vacation season-themed story. The project would require me to go door-to-door on our thirty fourth Avenue. I used to be skeptical, as a result of I believed nobody would wish to speak to a stranger, and in the event that they did, few if any would have something significantly novel or fascinating to say, a lot much less one thing that certified as a miracle.
I couldn’t have been extra incorrect, on all counts.
Everybody invited me into their residence, keen to speak. Every household shared a narrative they thought to be life-changing, one thing they thought of their very own non-public miracle. No two have been alike. By the tip of the day, I had crammed two yellow authorized pads to the brim.
All of us have tales to share, if somebody will simply pay attention.
Greg Joseph
Solar Metropolis, Ariz.
