Concern over ‘lack of regulation’ of prescription-only drug adverts

ISLAMABAD, Dec 25 (ONLINE): Experts are calling on the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to introduce tighter sanctions for companies advertising prescription-only drugs.

The calls come following an investigation by The BMJ which found that the MHRA has not issued a single sanction for prescription drug adverts in the last five years despite dozens of complaints.

James Cave, Editor in Chief of the Drug & Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB), says this lack of sanctions and internal monitoring provides only ‘weak incentive’ for companies to abstain from advertising prescription drugs.

Cave says prescription-only adverts could harm patients, and he is particularly concerned about the number of patient-facing webpages advertising the weight loss medicine Wegovy (semaglutide).

Blogs about weight loss drugs found on patient facing homepages
According to government guidelines, the prohibition on advertising of prescription-only medicines to the public applies to traditional media, such as magazine advertisements, as well as social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
But Cave says a web search for the Wegovy had hundreds of thousands of hits, many of which are adverts and blog posts available to members of the public.

One blog post which sparked alarm, entitled “All about Wegovy”, was featured on Pharmadoctor, a website which supports pharmacists to provide services for patients.

The blog post stated that “Wegovy is a weekly weight loss injection made famous by celebrities such as Elon Musk and Boris Johnson. If Wegovy is suitable for you, your pharmacist will be able to provide it.”

In October, Shai Mulinari, associate professor of sociology at Lund University, and Piotr Ozieranski, senior lecturer of social and policy sciences at the University of Bath, filed a complaint to the MHRA in regard to this blog post.

The pair said they were “appalled” that the company was marketing Wegovy “directly to the public” and that the “All about Wegovy” blog post was advertised on the patient-facing home page.

In response, the MHRA said it had “been removed in line with our guidance.” But The BMJ says the blog post remains online, and only a link and the word “Wegovy” had been removed from the homepage.

Pharmadoctor CEO Graham Thoms told The BMJ that Pharmadoctor only aimed to inform patients about Wegovy and that it had kept the blog post online because the MHRA hadn’t required it be taken down.

An ‘over reliance’ on complaints
Cave says the MHRA’s approach is “completely out of date” and criticised the authority’s apparent reliance on complaints from individuals to highlight online advertisements that break rules.

In response, the healthcare regulator said it actively monitors advertisements for prescription medicines. However, the MHRA did not respond to a question about how many people are tasked with this.

The BMJ also contacted the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which operates its own codes of practice. A spokesperson said that it too takes advertising of prescription medicine seriously and has scaled up its monitoring of online advertisements with the help of AI.