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# RFK Jr. Attacks ‘Corrupt’ Drug Firms and DTC Ads
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/rfk-jr-attacks-corrupt-drug-firms-and-dtc-ads/
- Published: 2025-05-28T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T15:12:49.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5159262

HHS secretary **Robert F. Kennedy Jr.** is continuing his verbal assault against the pharmaceutical industry, claiming that they control the nightly news content because of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, which he says will be limited soon under his watch.

During a 5/27-aired *The Ultimate Human* [podcast,](https://www.theultimatehuman.com/podcast-episodes/robert-f-kennedy-jr-how-to-fix-americas-health-crisis-as-hhs-secretary?ref=fdaweb.com) Kennedy said the network news anchors’ salaries are indirectly paid by DTC ads, and because of this, they have to “frighten us all about infectious diseases, and they’ve got to make us all comply with the pharmaceutical mandates. They’re not giving us real news and they’re not asking the questions that they ought to be asking. There’s no skepticism.” Kennedy said the news programs are scared to raise the obvious problems with vaccines and other drugs like they did 20 years ago. “They will never do that today,” he told podcast host **Gary Brecka**.

“A drug company does not have carte blanche from FDA to advertise any product it wants, and there are conditions that we can place on it,” Kennedy said. He noted that there was a “bad Supreme Court case recently that equated pharmaceutical advertising with freedom of speech and endowed it with a limited First Amendment protection. There are still things that we can do, and we’re working on that and we think we’re going to be able to do something.”

Kennedy also told Brecka that the drug industry has its control over the $46 billion granted each year for research by the NIH. “Unfortunately, that system has been corrupted through a number of different factors, so that people who get the money tend to be people who have been approved by the industry through a variety of levers,” he said on the podcast. “They are part of an old boys network that knows what they can say and what they can’t say and what they can research what they can't, and they’re not going to research anything that leads to results that may diminish corporate profits.

“The other thing is,” Kennedy continued, “there’s no replication, so there is a huge incentive to cheat on the science… because they know what the outcome is, and they write the outcome before they write the study… And so what we’re going to do is devote probably 20% of the NIH budget to replication.”

Additionally, Kennedy said NIH research will stop publishing in *The Lancet*, *New England Journal of Medicine*, *JAMA,* and other journals, because “they’re all corrupt.” He said the former heads of some of the most prestigious journals agree and admit they have become a “vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda… So unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there, and we're going to create our own journals in-house, and they will become the preeminent journals because if you get NIH funding, it is appointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”