11 Comments
May 23, 2023Liked by Rebecca Culshaw Smith

These ads are targeting people who are young, gay, black, trans, and/or drag queens, and who have not yet realized that pretty much all pharmaceutical advertising campaigns are a scam.

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Wow, where does one even begin???

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It's notable that the ads promote drugs to open-endedly "prevent infection" while visually and emotionally weaving in the suggestion that one takes it as much for others as for oneself. But the disclaimer words of course tell you its taken before one is HIV positive. So again a drug of - at best - dubious benefit to an individual is pitched to a cohort as something one does as a responsible member. Also it seems to me that there's a creepy, lurking dissonance between the underlying message that sex is so very dangerous and the glipses of fun everyone is supposed to be having in the endless opportunities for flirtation and seduction. The whole enterprise - and I mean enterprise- seems constructed to foster anxiety and/or self loathing.

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These ads are both FDA regulated, meaning they have to adhere to the rules that the ads balance risks and benefits and only make claims that have been evaluated by the FDA. Neither makes a claim about efficacy. The FDA actually banned PrEP Ads until 2020. Much more dangerous are ads put out by AIDS charities and the CDC which are not regulated by the FDA. Those ads say things like "99% effective" and they push PrEP on non FDA indicated groups, which would be illegal off-label marketing. Truvada, for instance, is not FDA-indicated for injection drug users, but the CDC promotes PrEP at needle exchanges. I think, at a minimum, public health agencies and third party nonprofits need to adhere to the FDA restrictions, as weak as they are.

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One of the most notable things to me is that they won’t use numbers for efficacy estimates, because they know the 99% figure is the result of wild extrapolation and does not hold up to scrutiny.

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These ads, like all drug ads, gives the viewer the impression that life is happy and wonderful, of course as long as one takes the drug. The flip side of that is if one doesn't take the drugs, life may not happy and wonderful. They also portray the homosexual/transsexual lifestyle in a normal, positive way, with a future even, with predominately black men and (I'm assuming) black women with even a black doctor, an obvious attempt to increase the number of black people on these drugs. There also appears to be a heterosexual couple so maybe they're quietly marketing these drugs to heterosexuals? They also instill a fear of HIV, with a small line at the bottom of one that says HIV is the cause of AIDS, and to get tested regularly, as if testing is foolproof.

Ads are made to sell things, if they didn't, there would be none. Sadly, many will see these and be persuaded to start these drugs without considering their history, their questionable efficacy and harmful effects. How many young people, children even, will see these ads and think that lifestyle, and the drugs that go along with it, are okay?

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Gosh, I've never heard the term "prep up". That's how little corporate media I watch.

It's incredibly frightening to hear them propagandizing to healthy people. Take pharmaceutical products if you're healthy. This is a drug you take if you "don't have hiv", and it may harm you if you do. This is very strange to me.

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They're telling minorities to make themselves sick.

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Guys this HIV thing is dangerous let's do all we can to have a generation that will be HIV free.

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I wish they marked this prevention methods to low income countries long ago to prevent new infections

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Romans 1 says it best.

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