jmason.eth 🦇🔊

Hey @Jason - I used to consult for pharma companies. The key point about pharma advertising is they don’t spend to impact customers who watch news. It’s to impact the news itself. Pharma sees ad spending as part of their lobbying and public affairs budget. It is a way to buy off news networks to influence the debate. It isn’t complicated - if pharma is the largest source of revenue for nearly every mainstream media entity in the country (which it is), those media entities will think twice before writing a story negative of pharma or seriously investigating why Americans increasingly sicker (which is good for pharma). Let’s take ozempic. The issues at hand isn’t whether the Besties take it but whether the government should pay hundreds of billions to subsidize the drug as first line of defense against obesity (which is on the table). The media - from @nytimes to @60Minutes - have run major pieces saying obesity isn’t in our control and arguing we should prescribe this drug widely - even to children. These are pharma talking points. They need to define obesity as a lifetime disease to “manage” in order to get government funding for ozempic. An alternate (and truer) story would be investigating why we’ve all gotten heavier - which is due to ultra processed food our government has subsidized. We didn’t get systematically lazier in the last 50 years - something happened. The USDA panel on nutrition, which 95% of the members are paid for by pharma, still recommends Americans two years and up can have 10% of their calories he added refunded sugar. 10% of all food stamp spending goes to sugary drinks. An average child eats 100x more sugar than they did 100 years ago for instance. There are clear policies to reel that back (like cutting subsidies) and urgent stories needed by the media on the true root cause of obesity (which itself is just one manifestation of our chronic disease crisis tied to food). But you rarely see this - the coverage overwhelmingly carries the pharma narrative and does not explore root causes. This is by design because, again, pharma is able to buy the news. Today, 80%+ of deaths and 90% of healthcare costs in the US are tied to PREVENTABLE and REVERSIBLE lifestyle diseases. Heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, many forms of cancer and Alzheimer’s are essentially food-borne illnesses and would be wiped out with simple public policies to un-poison our food supply. In tech, innovation means lower prices and better quality. In healthcare, more spending means worse outcomes. Healthcare is now the largest AND fastest growing industry in the country. If the American experiment fails, it will be because we let our country become sicker, fatter, more infertile and more depressed at an increasing rate (which is what’s happening) while also letting our country go bankrupt from healthcare costs. This is the largest issue facing our country and the MSM is not only disinterested, they are actively gaslighting the problem. That’s why pharma ads matter.