The spot makes lofty claims about weight-loss drugs offered by the telehealth company Hims & Hers, but says little about risks.
The first thing the ad shows is a scale. Over the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s anthem “This is America,” a narrator laments the nation’s obesity crisis and “the system” that is “built to keep us sick and stuck.” It notes the “$160 billion weight-loss industry that feeds on our failure” as images of junk cereal, pie and a cheeseburger flash across the screen.
“Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies,” the narrator says, adding: “There are medications that work, but they’re priced for profits, not patients.”
The minute-long ad, which will run during the Super Bowl, pitches a “life-changing” solution to all this: weight-loss drugs, as offered by the telehealth startup Hims & Hers. Viewers see a fridge stocked with Hims & Hers-branded vials of medications. These are compounded drugs, meaning they haven’t gone through the traditional approval process designed to safeguard against risks to consumers — a point the ad largely glosses over.
On Friday, Senators Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, sent a letter to the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration saying the ad “risks misleading patients.”
“Nowhere in this promotion is there any side-effect disclosure, risk or safety information as would be typically required in a pharmaceutical advertisement,” they wrote.
The ad has also drawn the ire of some doctors who prescribe obesity drugs, as well as the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a coalition of nonprofit organizations including some that are affiliated with the drug industry. The group sent a letter to the F.D.A. on Thursday calling the ad “dangerous” and warning it only discloses that the medications are compounded briefly and in a small font. The organization called on the Fox Corporation to withdraw the ad.