Turning Back the Clock on TV Commercials

I remember with fondness the TV ads from my younger days, especially the car ads. OK, OK, I like old cars. Ed Sullivan was brought to us by Lincoln/Mercury. I will never forget the phrase” long, low, lovely Lincoln, and Mercomatic.” Dinah Shore had a talk show and would sing “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”

Then there was Brylcreem, with the slogan “a little dab will do ya.” Who doesn’t rmember the Maxwell house “good to the last drop”? Or “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” Or “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

Today, if you watch an hour’s worth of TV, you’ll see five ads for Big Pharma. You’ll see ads for Paxlovid, Rinvoq, Ozempic, the RSV vaccine and Prevnar, a vaccine for pneumococcal pneumonia.

There was an integrity to the old ads. Lincoln/Mercury didn’t offer Walter Cronkite ten years worth of new Lincolns to slant the news in their direction nor did they supply Fauci with 20 years of new Lincolns if he mandated buying a new Lincoln in order to build herd immunity and to be a good neighbor.  

If a doctor told patients the choice to buy a new Chevy was theirs to make, the doctors didn’t have to worry about medical boards going after their licenses or complaints by their peers about not singing the popular songs. With the old ads there was no cozy backroom antics requiring all newly pregnant people to purchase a new Lincoln in order to have a safe pregnancy.

Some of you may even remember payola in the music industry. Some disc jockeys were paid to play a song more frequently than others. Years ago, that was considered unethical. Today being paid to promote Big Pharma products appears to be the established soup de jour.

Remember the story of Henny Penny, more commonly known as Chicken Little in the U.S. The hen runs through the chicken yard yelling “The sky is falling.” She convinced many of her hen neighbors that the sky was falling and they eventually ran into the fox’s den for protection.

The world has just barely survived a very large Henny Penny real-life fox den caused by Big Pharma and Big Government. I think the lesson to learn here is that the average person is beginning to recognize that Big Pharma and the government have lied to them.

So, Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Medicine have some fences to mend before the average consumer is willing to trust them again, to return to business as usual. Indeed, Vinay Prasad has written about the failure of the public health system in the U.S. and how we can no longer trust the CDC, especially when the attempt is made to silence physicians who question what is being promoted.

We were making unprecedented massive decisions and we had ~zero debates. Worse, any dissent was punished. Francis Collins, NIH director, famously emailed Anthony Fauci calling for a “quick and devastating” take down of the “fringe” epidemiologists who opposed lockdowns….It’s one thing to act in times of uncertainty. It is another thing to stifle dissent and dialog. In many ways talking with the “fringe” epidemiologists could have helped us. We might have reached a compromise, with schools opening sooner than they otherwise would.

I myself am heartily tired of the label “misinformation.” Self-righteously sling the label misinformation at any statement and somehow your side is magically correct. One man’s misinformation is another man’s truth. Reasonable analysis of the facts are nowhere to be found in this mudslinging attempt to overcome any opinion one disagrees with.

It’s honking big trucks now being advertised on television instead of Lincoln/Mercury, but the choice between one car or another doesn’t effect your health. It’s time to ban Big Pharma ads on television and return to allowing doctors to decide what treatments, including medications and vaccines, to offer their patients.