For some, MAHA has been defined by its efforts around medicines and vaccines, like the White House's push to suggest there's a link between acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and autism, in spite of numerous studies showing no link between the two. For others, the MAHA movement has been defined by its efforts to improve America's food supply and to remove artificial dyes and other synthetic additives from America's packaged food and drinks.
Children's Health Defense, the organization founded by Kennedy, this week filed a citizen's petition asking FDA commissioner Marty Makary to deem Moderna's and Pfizer's COVID vaccines "misbranded" and revoke their licenses "due to a lack of compliance with FDA regulations." The argument is based on the fine print surrounding the vaccines' conversion from emergency use early in the pandemic to full approval later on.
If you've googled "weight loss," there's a good chance that one of the first search results that came up was a website for Ozempic. But Ozempic hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for weight loss - it's only approved to treat Type 2 diabetes. So why is it showing up there? The answer is something called a sponsored search result. Companies pay search engines so that their
But I saw many class actions and mass torts that seemed designed only to transfer money from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to plaintiffs' lawyers. Whether a drug or device actually harmed anyone was beside the point; anyone who was actually hurt could file their own individual lawsuit. The class actions and mass torts picked up the stragglers, whose situations didn't merit filing a case - people who overpaid for an allegedly dangerous drug
"Online pharmacies are advertising drugs with only upsides mentioned, contributing to America's culture of overreliance on pharmaceuticals for health," Makary wrote in a JAMA Network Open article focused on how the agency is overdue for a "crackdown on misleading pharmaceutical advertisements."
You see, until 1997, drug companies were required to include massive amounts of information about a drug's potential side effects and risks in any ads for it. The amount of information required could fit in, say, a full-page magazine ad - but it was far too much to squeeze into a 30- or 60-second TV spot. That meant pharmaceutical ads were, while not banned, almost unheard of on television.
After vapes staved off the extinction of tobacco, a new generation of nicotine products is promising a safer, albeit no less addictive, form of consumption through tobacco-free pouches made popular by the likes of Zyn and Velo. Now, a celebrity-backed upstart called Sesh is trying to challenge those incumbents. Buoyed by $40 million in venture funding from Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale's 8VC, along with music stars Diplo and Post Malone,
