He has a number of nutsy ideas, but also some good ones. Credit: Getty
It’s still a surreal sight: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s health secretary under President Trump. The scion of a Democratic dynasty who became an anti-vaccine gadfly and seemed, in his final years, doomed to irrelevancy — a Democratic campaign for president was going nowhere, and his independent bid wasn’t faring much better — is now one of the more powerful bureaucrats in America. There is much to be alarmed about with Kennedy, from his hatred of virtually all vaccines to his belief that bird flu should be allowed to run rampant through poultry, but many on the Left make the mistake of dismissing him outright because he’s allied himself with Trump.
The United States needs a health secretary who will, at the minimum, cast a sceptical eye on the pharmaceutical industry, which turns enormous profits and helps ensure American health care will always be commodified. Before the pandemic, most Democrats had little problem railing against Big Pharma. They were the villains, deservedly so, of the opioid epidemic, and it was not an exaggeration to say several of the pharmaceutical behemoths, most notably Purdue Pharma, had blood on their hands.
When Covid arrived, however, the politics shifted. Republicans resisted the vaccines once President Joe Biden was in office, even though Operation Warp Speed had been a Team Trump accomplishment. Democrats defended the Covid vaccines and their manufacturers — Pfizer and Moderna, in particular — at all costs, even though the jabs did cause injuries in relatively rare instances and couldn’t stop the spread of the novel coronavirus as originally promised.
Naturally, RFK Jr. was a Covid-vaccine sceptic. Hence he became, in the 2020s, a public enemy for many liberals.
Yet he should be listened to when it comes to one of his most cherished causes: banning pharmaceutical advertising from television. In a sane world, this would be a bipartisan cause. Few countries on Earth allow pharmaceutical companies to relentlessly market their drugs to unsuspecting consumers. Non-Americans are always shocked by what is permitted on the airwaves. Turn on the television, especially the news, for any length of time, and you will be barraged by ads for every type of malady under the Sun. Since the Nineties, drug companies have spent tens of billions on these ads.
Drug advertisements began appearing with regularity in newspapers and magazines in the Eighties, but they were mostly kept off TV by a requirement that ads naming a specific illness include the long list of side effects. In the late Nineties, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its rules, permitting advertisers to briefly summarise the drug’s risks. The TV floodgates were thrown wide open. These days, the most aggressive campaigns are for newer medications that haven’t yet gone generic; competing brands duke it out in a packed field of similar drugs to reach patients with widespread conditions like arthritis and diabetes.
The average American drug ad is easily parodied but plainly effective. Typically, some older adults are shone in a cheery setting with friends and family. The colour palette is bright. A narrator with a warm voice speaks about health challenges that might arise. The older adults are never shown to be in pain or distress; they might be taking a jog, playing with their dog, or firing up the grill. They’re bright-eyed, maybe laughing. Towards the end of the ad, the narrator will briefly summarise the drug’s side effects. Anyone with a morbid sense of humour can enjoy the contrast, just a bit: the scene remains focused on life’s joys as the narrator informs you the drug might cause rashes, bleeding, blackouts, or suicidal thoughts (in “rare cases”, rest assured).
But we know the big business of Big Pharma is no laughing matter. The drug companies are prepared to furiously fight any sort of ban that Kennedy might attempt. They will call up their expensive lobbyists on retainer in Washington to bend rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats to their will. They will probably get to Trump, who doesn’t feel passionately about the issue.
The courts have snagged reforms in the past. Efforts to minimally restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated, often on First Amendment grounds. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drug’s price, but a judge blocked the policy, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.
Will Congress act? In theory, if Trump prioritised the ban, lawmakers could push it forward. The current Republican Party will obey Trump’s commands. The narrow majority the GOP holds in the House could be bolstered by a slew of progressive and populist Democrats who might view a fight with Big Pharma as a winning issue. Several centrist Democrats in swing districts, including Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state, campaigned on a platform that was critical of pharmaceutical companies.
There’s a coalition to be built if the Trump administration takes the issue seriously. If a critical mass of Senate Republicans back legislation, it’s not hard to imagine the most Left-wing members of the Democratic conference, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supporting a ban on TV ads. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who may run for president and has swerved in a more populist direction, could be a convert, too.
But that’s the rub: Trump has never demonstrated that he is all that interested in the granular work of getting policy priorities through Congress. In the first term, he was content to let Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan hash out a corporate tax cut and attempt — unsuccessfully — to repeal ObamaCare.
For now, Congress is focused on classic GOP priorities like tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting Medicaid, the health-care programme that covers more than 70 million Americans. In addition to being cruel to the poor, a budget reconciliation package with tax and health-care cuts is likely to prove inflationary, especially when paired with tariffs. Beyond the tariffs, there’s no grander project here. The populism Trump promised isn’t being delivered — DOGE, and its wanton budget cuts, certainly aren’t it.
What conservatives don’t quite understand is that the truest owning of the libs will come through triangulation. Trump can begin to subdue Democrats by pursuing policies like a ban on TV pharmaceutical ads, forcing the Left to stand with him for something popular or oppose him and appear extremely out of touch. Trump doesn’t seem to have that kind of savvy. He’s fine to let his party scheme over Medicaid cuts.
That will not end well for the GOP. Democrats know how to campaign on health care, and taking it away from working-class people will make the 2026 midterms rather easy for the party out of power. Those political ads write themselves. They’ll be sandwiched between the 30-second spots for heart-disease pills that may cause internal bleeding and murderous thoughts. In rare cases.
Ross Barkan is a columnist for New York and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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SubscribeThis was written with such insufferable arrogance that I didn’t even care about the meat of the story. Nobody knows “working people” like the urban novelist that always repeats the term “working people.”
I agree with you T Bone. Trump is delivering what the American people asked for in November. Seems like that is a rare occurrence in the UK.
Did people ask for inflation and spats with its major allies?
It was clear what Trump was going to deliver and, regrettably that is what people voted for:
Kayfabe, entertaining reality TV with heroes, villains and grudge matches, revenge and suffering for the enemies, a great gangsta president to identify with and admire, somebody to tell you that the world was simple and that all those things you did not like (global warming, pandemics, limits on American power, …) were not real but just conspiracies. All the things you would expect from your favourite TV show. Most people probably know deep down that none of this will improve their lives because it is not actually real, just like they realise they will not get rich by buying a lottery ticket. They just prefer watching the Trump show to trying to deal with reality.
They just prefer watching the Trump show to trying to deal with reality.
This is backwards: the Trump was made possible, perhaps necessary, by political reality. No candidate, not even the establishment types who yearned to be president, campaigned on maintaining the status quo. They all promise change but never do it. THAT is what made an outsider viable. Until people in the DC orbit understand that, the post-Trump years will be more of the same politicians and presidents that created the initial problems.
Not all wrong, but I would put it slightly differently. With Trump (as with Brexit, that I know better) people were unhappy and wanted something different. Only nobody had any good proposals for anything to do that would actually help. So they voted for anything that was different, whether it would help or not. Exactly as in the old joke “We need something different, Trump is different, there for we need Trump!” It was obvious that Brexit was going to make things worse, but it got voted in just because it was a change. It was also obvious that Trump was going to be exactly the kind of incompetent, authoritarian disaster that we can see now, but again, people voted for him just because he was different (and very entertaining), with no reason to expect that he would make anything better.
The trouble is that a lot of the problems we are dealing with have no obvious, or nice, solution. Dealing with reality means facing up to that, and voting for the people who can deal with it as well as possible. Only the people of the US had other ideas.
It was also obvious that Trump was going to be exactly the kind of incompetent, authoritarian disaster that we can see now,
Is there some evidence for this because the people who voted for him see a border being controlled, talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, an examination of how our money gets spent, the end of at least one useless Cabinet-level agency, etc. It’s not going to be perfect; no administration will be, but it’s a vast improvement over what preceded Trump. And think back to the 2016 & 2020 elections; who other than Orange McBadman represented a deviation from the status quo? Everyone else was either in Congress or some other ex-officeholder.
Comments on Pete Hegseth’s activities? Comments on Trump’s disgrace of Zelensky in the Oval Office? Comments on DOGE’s inability to substantiate any claims of fraud? Comments on Trump’s incomprehensible tariffs? Comments on Trump’s random and bizarre instigation with Canada? Trump is akin to a psych patient given carte blance to run the country however he sees fit.
What has Trump accomplished during his second stint as President thus far, in your view?
Sadly your recollection of the post-Brexit UK is out of kilter with reality. Every PM and the vast majority of MPs of every stripe since, the financial markets, every Tom Cobbley and All conspired not to give us Brexit in any shape or form, regardless of the electorate’s wishes. Rewind to 2016 and give us a PM and parliament willing to support UK as an independent country and we would have a very different picture today.
Sure, The Biden admin ran a security state apparatus against their rivals and enemies, invoked control of the media, embraced de-banking among other authoritarian gambits, and you think Trump is an “authoritarian disaster”?
The only people that think what they are seeing is disaster are the Progressive Fascists and their suck-ups who are watching the corrupt gravy trough that they have been so accustomed to feed from go empty.
Perhaps you can explain how people like the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bidens, who have held no other jobs but “public service” became bajillionaires?
I think what you’re missing is that people don’t agree and nations don’t agree. That’s why socialism doesn’t work. That’s why globalism was never going to work. Maybe Trump is as big an idiot as you say and maybe he makes the US worse off. Then Trump will be remembered as a failure and a bad President, but it won’t really change anything else. American power is limited and the unipolar era is ending. Bottom line is that if there’s nobody capable of enforcing the rules, then there aren’t any. We’re back to square one. You may as well give up on anything that requires more than one country or a few together to accomplish. Human nature is reasserting itself and a lot of people that hoped for something better don’t like it. Personally, I never let my expectations get that high. I just recall all those times my mother told me that ‘life isn’t fair’.
Yup. Trumpy isn’t a cause, he’s an effect.
Globalism had its own blindspots and was just as guilty of denying reality. They ignored political unrest, closing factories, rising inequality, and working class anger. The globalists, and perhaps yourself, expected people to just deal with it. Biden famously told some factory workers to ‘learn to code’. Even if correct, it was a stupid thing to say, because that’s not a reasonable expectation. People have a nature that is just as impossible to override through government policy as is a pandemic or the affects of CO2 on global climate. That shows as much denial as anything Trump is doing.
The fact is there are times and situations where the only answer is direct conflict that pits tribes of people against each other in competition for land and scarce resources. This is such a time. Trump is a nationalist attempting to use American power, wealth, influence, and resources to benefit Americans at the expense of other nations. That is something that has happened since tribes of people living in mud huts fought over access to a waterhole or who had the right to hunt mammoths in which open fields. It is natural, it is real, and it is inevitable. Trump may end up doing a terrible job, and if that’s the case, he and his party will be voted out of office in favor of someone who will hopefully be more effective. Personally, I’ll accept any solution that avoids out and out violent warfare, and Trump seems sufficiently averse to open warfare in a way that the Bushes and Clintons weren’t.
Pandemics, climate change, and limits on American power are real things. So are human tribalism and human greed. Nobody can abolish any of them. The solution to pandemics is that a bunch of people die and the ones that don’t fight about it afterwards. The solution to climate change is that the climate will change and people will either adapt or go extinct. The solution to limitations on American power is the nationalistic struggles between nations that constitute diplomacy and war. The ‘rules based order’ will expire because as you say, the enforcer of those rules does not have unlimited power and neither does anybody else. Strong and weak nations will exert power and form alliances and trading blocs according to their interests and eventually a new balance of power will be reached. Nature will restore equilibrium
I don’t think anybody is saying that pandemics, climate change, and power aren’t real things. I’m sure some are, but that’s true on all sides. Trump doesn’t have a monopoly on silly headed idealists. I’d argue the opposite, actually. I’d argue that people do understand what Trump is and do understand what he’s doing, the good and the bad. They know he’s breaking the global system. They wanted it broken. They know it wasn’t working for them. They know that the elites expected westerners to sacrifice for things like Netzero and the development of the global south, and they said no. You may not like it, but that’s human nature. The globalist solutions depended on people’s better nature, and basically every system of government, every utopian community, every religion, that has required good behavior from people has failed, often badly, and often with horrendous results. Thus, there were no globalist solutions to pandemics, climate change, or the power struggles between nations. They didn’t exist except as wishful thinking in the minds of people who were too affluent to think clearly and understand human nature.
We don’t get to pick and choose which realities we have to deal with. Other people are a reality. People that aren’t very nice are a reality. People who disagree with us are a reality. People that don’t believe in experts are a reality. Unfortunately, they’re no easier to change that than any of the others. Have decades of progressive control of education produced better people, or have they produced basically the same range of good, bad, and mostly somewhere between with slightly different prejudices who are intolerant and tribal about different things? Other people are a reality that is no more subject to change than any of the others. That’s the blind spot of globalism, and its right where Trump threw the right hook that knocked the globalists down for the count.
The Inflation rate is 2.8% Billy and yes we asked for spats with the free loading nations like say Denmark.
As it happens, Denmark had about the same number of casualties by million of population in Afghanistan as the US or UK. Denmark is small, but that does not mean they are freeloaders, any more than Rhode Island is. It just so happens that Denmark controls something that Trump would like to steal.
Yeah there’s so much Danish pride on Greenland isn’t there?
How many times have you missed your defense spending targets for NATO in the last 10 years while the US taxpayers subsidize your defense. You trash us and brag about your socially tolerant welfare state.
Oh look, Trump’s Greenland rhetoric made you increase your defense spending. Interesting how you’re just now finding the money huh?
There’s clearly enough pride there to make Vance cowardly change the itinerary of his visit to avoid the cold shoulder of the locals
I confess I can’t see why Trump wants Greenland. I understand it’s not a paying proposition for Denmark and its possession is more a point of pride than an economic bulwark. As far as I can tell, the south raises a few sheep expensively and the north is a good place for weather stations, and that’s it.
2 reasons. 1 – check the position in relation to USA, Russia, etc. 2 – check out the minerals under that boring-looking sheep pasture.
I’m genuinely sorry that this site is littered with so many MAGA acolytes who don’t understand the harm Trump is causing to our country – and the world at large. The orange man has been unhinged since his return to Washington, and it is only a matter of time until his followers realize that.
If he knew working people so well, presumably he should have told all his liberal friends and politicians so maybe they could put forth a better candidate with a stronger campaign and a winning message. Evidence speaks louder than words.
More lazy journalism, he stated in congress he is not anti vax .. he and his children are vaccinated…. It’s the testing he has issue with ..
Lazy journalism is right. Disappointing for Unherd. “His presidential bid was going nowhere.” You missed the bit about unprecedented relentless DNC lawfare to keep him off the ballot. The old powers-that-be skull-duggery hard at work to stay in power at any cost. It is they who made themselves irrelevant.
I think he also has an issue with the rampant corruption that exists around and within the pharmaceutical industry that makes cover for dodgy research and inadequate testing. I thank God for him.
The most vital point is how much of the US media’s advertising revenue pharma adverts constitute, and the extent to which this discourages them from investigating pharma’s more dubious products and practices.
The COVID vaccines are a case in point. Primary vaccination likely benefitted older demographics but gave zero benefit, or net harm, to younger ones, given the side effect profile (including blood clots and myocarditis), the brevity of protection and the low risk of severe disease for healthy people aged under 50/60. Since the vaccinated were infected anyhow, one can’t argue that vaccinating the young delivered a ‘greater good’ by protecting the elderly, irrespective of the doubtful ethics of such an approach.
Multiple booster vaccines have been given with no proper evaluation at all, whilst concerns have mounted on e.g. DNA contamination, including with the SV40 promoter and on the consequences of sometimes-prolonged induction of Spike protein manufacture in human tissues, including in cardiac blood vessels.
Where is the mainstream media investigation of these concerns? Is Kennedy right to think they have been ‘bought off’ by advertising reveue? He surely has a prima facie case.
Excellent comments! The author of the article (Barkin) completely misses the major issue, which as David points out, makes the media majorly dependent on Pharma ads. This is the root cause of media bias against criticism of Pharma products including any questioning of vaccine safety.
David L also hits the issue of concerns about COVID vax safety perfectly. COVID itself was no risk to the youngest population, and therefore ANY health risk presented by the vaccines was criminal. The risk/reward ratio is infinite for them. Sacrificing our children under the guise of protecting me (grandpa) is unforgivable. Pfizer’s “rush to market” “at the speed of science” was deadly for too many young people. This is precisely the concern RFK wants to address: current vaccine testing is a farce and must be addressed immediately. Unfortunately most of the population is so conditioned for so long to believe they are ALL “safe and effective” and always will be, it will take a miracle to turn around.
Might also point out that Sanders and Warren are the biggest recipients in Congress of Pharma funding.
One of the problems I found was that we are used to vaccines like polio having been tested and used for decades that we are easily fooled into thinking it is OK if we are told it is “safe and effective”. The fact it is neither is neither here nor there to Big Pharma. I’m in my mid-70’s, diabetic and overweight so reluctantly took the first lot of jabs but have refused subsequent top-ups.
Mmmm, best to research this and you will find out that hardly any vaccine has been correcly tested how it should be: vaccinated cohort against not vaccinated very similar cohort and evaluation of a large pallet of health related parameters…. but we prefer cheap narrow research and blow up the outcomes if they suit.
The average age of death from covid was 82 therefore it posed little real danger to the vast majority. Obviously there were tragic exceptions but many who died had co-morbidities and/or were obese. Also very low levels of vit D played a part.
In the early stages people having difficulty breathing – something I have experienced with pneumonia- were sedated and put on respirators. This was a terrible mistake and eventually dropped.
The whole thing was an absolute sh show. Three members of my family worked for the NHS during that period and they were appalled by what they witnessed and had to bear. Not least of which was threat of having to accept a mandated vaccination- that had not been tried and tested. They witnessed terrible suffering of the elderly and those dying lonely deaths caused by cancers, heart disease etc. and the many people who were being sent away and made to wait despite distressing symptoms of other illnesses, or having long awaited operations cancelled. One of my relatives, then a 38 year old senior nurse practitioner quit the NHS in disgust.
Does anyone else get sick and tired of reading and listening to the same ole liberal talking points about conservatives? Tax cuts for the rich, throwing grandma off the cliff by taking away her Medicare, reducing your social security, taking away your healthcare, orange man bad, on and on and on. They have no record to run on so Granny Warren, Mr Magoo Sanders, the red lipstick bartender and the rest of the so called “progressives” spew the same old tired talking points. How’s that been working out for them lately? By the way, you can tax the rich at 100% and it still won’t put a dent to the 33 trillion plus that they’ve criminally inflicted upon our kids and grandkids.
“from his hatred of virtually all vaccines “. His hatred is reserved for poorly researched and tested vaccines and other medications – ie most of them. Perfectly justified.
” even though the jabs did cause injuries in relatively rare instances”
Were they rare? There is lots of evidence that they caused lots of injuries, even if you only look at VAERS. Why does this writer refuse to acknowledge even the existence of VAERS and the numerous research papers?
Please provide evidence for this. I am on the edge of my seat, waiting for this ground-breaking, earth-shattering proof. Thank you!
tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting Medicaid,
Every time I read nonsense like this, it dilutes from the point the author is trying to make but is unable to get through without including the requisite leftist talking points.
Tax cuts will benefit people who pay taxes and yes, many of them are wealthy. Is there a sum of someone else’s money that rightly belongs to everyone else? Every study ever done on who pays taxes shows the same thing: the top 25% of earners pay far more than 50% of the freight, a point that the ‘fair share’ cult conveniently ignores. Also, no one wants to gut Medicaid, though policing it would be nice, much like Social Security could use some attention so that 150-year-old ‘recipients’ no longer cash checks.
Drug companies don’t advertise on TV directly to consumers to convince us to ask our doctor about getting certain prescriptions; they do it to pump billions of dollars into CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC/CBS/NBC News and so on, in order to indirectly influence “news” coverage. Two minutes after watching an Paxlovid ad, you see a CNN news segment on how advanced treatments for Covid have become. Two minutes after watching an Ozempic ad, you see a Fox News story about how great the new weight loss injections are.
the working people hate the Democrat party, i don’t think the left understand how dire their situation is
Yeah, it’s very unfortunate for Democrats that their supporter base doesn’t blindly follow their leader, even when they are leading them into the abyss. Oh, how nice it would be to have followers who don’t actually care about policy, rhetoric, or substantive change – only enchanted by the spray tan and balding head of their leader. Individuals with sub-100 IQs are easier to lead.
I’d love for drug ads to be banned for no reason beyond the fact I hate watching them. Give me more insurance ads. Insurance companies are mostly parasites that literally sell nothing, but they make some really entertaining ads, and I appreciate that. That sort of makes up for selling what amounts to a promise, a promise they’ll do everything in their power to avoid keeping when the time comes anyway.
Still, there are more layers to big pharma than bad TV ads. The drug companies have other scams running. They work closely with federal regulators to get their medicines fast tracked while smaller companies get sidelined. They also hawk their pills directly to prescribing physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare providers. I suspect there are even kickbacks and corrupt deals between them in some cases. It’s bad enough that I have to make a point of asking for the oldest, most generic medicine for basically any illness or condition they tell me that I have. I just assume that every major corporation cares nothing about my welfare and wants nothing more than to take as much money from me as is possible. That works well enough to keep me out of most kinds of trouble.
Although it’s only marginally related to the article, on the subject of bird flu, the idea of letting it work its way through populations seems worth exploring. I mean, killing the entire flock if there’s an infection surely prevents the spread of genes of the birds that are able to fight it off.
Our lords and masters thankfully stopped short of killing the entire populations of towns where COVID infection had occurred, and so I wonder why exactly the response to infections in birds is to just kill the lot of them.
“The average American drug ad is easily parodied but plainly effective.”
The ads aren’t aimed at potential customers. They’re about buying the news.
Utter bilge.
“Trump can begin to subdue Democrats by pursuing policies like a ban on TV pharmaceutical ads, forcing the Left to stand with him for something popular or oppose him and appear extremely out of touch. Trump doesn’t seem to have that kind of savvy.”
Please google the most recent Continuing Resolution showdown.
And please review Trump’s recent speech to a Joint Session of Congress. He introduced many true heroes, worthy people and the Dems sat on their hands.
Progressives are hate-filled, so much so that their hate is more important than their empathy for a child recovering from cancer. Dems are the party of hate.
I’m fine with banning drug commercials, they’re ridiculous. But having said that, it’s also true that the US pharmaceutical industry has saved uncountable lives and relieved untold amounts of suffering through the decades. No, I don’t work for them, but I’ve been happy over and over and over to have access to their OTC pain and cold relievers, GERD medications, prescription antibiotics, and yes, even opiates, which are safe, legal drugs when used responsibly. Let the rebuttals begin.
Pharma has also caused a host of problems, from the useless statins to a variety of interventions that address symptoms while ignoring root causes. Because there is far more profit in perpetual ‘treatment’ of issues than in resolving them. The industry has become its own worst enemy. I agree there are drugs that have helped many and there are meds that do equivalent harm.
I don’t know how it is in the US but in the UK our doctors tend to treat each symptom individually, never bothering to look at the full picture, even the possibility that the latest symptom may be a side effect of the most recently-prescribed medicine.
Basically you are saying that the pharma industry has been largely effective. Isn’t that what you would expect?
Having seen some of these adverts in the US last month, “this will make your life so much better (though it might maim or kill you)”, society would be better off without them.
We could do well without adverts for gambling too. It interferes with nobody’s right to gamble.
Pretentious BS. Just another hack journalist trying to score a few clicks. I don’t know what world Mr. Barkan lives in, but it is certainly not the real one. Love the variety of UnHerd, and articles like these always are good for a morning laugh before heading out the door.
Barken never even explains why he hates drug ads. Sure, they’re annoying, but so are a lot of the ads on TV. The economics of pharma drive the advertising. Development costs are in the billions; risks of failure in testing are huge. That’s why they are mostly sold by big companies that can afford those costs and risks. When a drug is developed and approved, the cost per patient is driven by how many patients are needed to recover the development costs of the successful drug and all the false starts. A large number of users drives down the cost per user to the point where more people can afford the drug – even if the cost still looks prohibitive. It would be higher without the ads. That’s why the advertising. The government requires the litany of side-effects so potential customers can weigh the potential benefit and mortal risks in some cases. Interesting that the economics are similar to software. Why isn’t software free? Once it’s available for download, the cost per unit to the software companies is near zero. But they charge enough to recover their development costs and (gasp!) make a profit. Same as pharma. Full disclosure: I have no ties to the pharma industry.
If you don’t want to watch a commercial, don’t watch. If you don’t want to buy it, don’t buy. I do both regularly.
Another good article universally voted down in these comments by the pro-MAGA mob, who are so ridiculously sensitive to any criticism of their generals as to be blinded to the substance of arguments, like this one, that at least some of their policies have potential bipartisan appeal which, properly handled, could deliver real benefits to the American public.
Kennedy may or may not be a fruitcake in many regards, but legislation against these ridiculous ads would be universally popular and, (unmentioned by the author) would have the pro-MAGA ancillary benefit of removing a massive funding source (advertising) of the Main/Lamestream media.
Seriously, What’s not to like ?
Wow, this was an exceptionally lame piece.