Even folks who aren't into football tune into the Super Bowl for its ads, but this year there's some "big drama" around one that's set to air on Sunday, reports Quartz. A pharmaceuticals industry group is slamming a "dangerous" advertisement from Hims & Hers, asking the Food and Drug Administration and the Fox network, which is airing the championship game, to bar the ad from being broadcast. The issue with the one-minute ad, according to the Partnership for Safe Medicines: It's promoting compounded semaglutide, an off-brand version of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, for weight loss.
"As a knockoff copy of a prescription drug, the commercial for this product should comply with FDA prescription drug ad rules," Shabbir Imber Safdar, the group's executive director, wrote in a Wednesday letter to the FDA of the ad highlighting Hims & Hers' GLP-1 injections. "We request you act to enforce the laws and guidelines that protect Americans from misleading marketing in health products." The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry's main lobbying group that represents Ozempic and Wegovy drugmaker Novo Nordisk, adds in its own statement that it's "unclear ... how regulators are allowing this," per Bloomberg.
Ozempic and Wegovy users are paying $1,000 or more a month for their meds; the compounded semaglutide that Hims & Hers is offering runs under $200 monthly. Hims & Hers, meanwhile, is shrugging off criticism of the ad, which doesn't include any risk disclaimers like ads for the brand-name weight loss drugs do. "This is a clear attempt by industry groups to cancel an advertisement that directly calls out how they are part of a system that fails to prioritize the health of Americans," the company said in a statement, per Quartz. "The system is broken, and this is just another example of how they don't want Americans to know they have options." (More Super Bowl ads stories.)
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