Hims and Hers Super Bowl Ad Sparks Controversy Over Weight Loss Drugs

The first thing the ad shows is a scale. Over the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s anthem “This is America,” a narrator laments the nation’s obesity crisis and “the system” that is “built to keep us sick and stuck.” It notes the “$160 billion weight-loss industry that feeds on our failure” as images of junk cereal, pie and a cheeseburger flash across the screen.

“Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies,” the narrator says, adding: “There are medications that work, but they’re priced for profits, not patients.”

The minute-long ad, which will run during the Super Bowl,pitches a “life-changing” solution to all this: weight-loss drugs, as offered by the telehealth startup Hims & Hers. Viewers see a fridge stocked with Hims & Hers-branded vials of medications. These are compounded drugs, meaning they haven’t gone through the traditional approval process designed to safeguard against risks to consumers — a point the ad largely glosses over.

On Friday, Senators Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, sent a letter to the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration saying the ad “risks misleading patients.”

“Nowhere in this promotion is there any side-effect disclosure, risk or safety information as would be typically required in a pharmaceutical advertisement,” they wrote.

The ad has also drawn the ire of some doctors who prescribe obesity drugs, as well as the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a coalition of nonprofit organizations including some that are affiliated with the drug industry. The group sent a letter to the F.D.A. on Thursday calling the ad “dangerous” and warning it only discloses that the medications are compounded briefly and in a small font. The organization called on the Fox Corporation to withdraw the ad.

“Americans don’t understand the safety profile of compounded medications. So when you make a drug ad and don’t disclose it, there’s a safety problem,” said Shabbir Imber Safdar, the executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines.

Khobi Brooklyn, the chief corporate affairs officer at Hims & Hers, wrote in a statement shared with The Times that the company is complying with existing laws and “happy to continue working with Congress and the new administration to fix the broken health system and ensure that patients have choices for quality, safe and affordable health care.”

Some experts were shocked by the ad’s suggestion that a telehealth company, which profits from prescribing obesity medications, is standing up to the weight-loss industry, not a part of it.

“They try to present themselves as anti-establishment,” said Dr. Scott Hagan, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington who studies obesity. But the company represents “the cutting edge of, basically, capitalism in this space,” he added.

Hims & Hers and its rivals have used savvy marketing and convenient virtual prescribing platforms to bring compounded weight-loss drugs to the masses. The company and other telehealth platforms like it have capitalized on a stipulation that allows compounding pharmacies to dispense their own versions when brand-name drugs like Ozempic are in short supply.

By some estimates, millions of people are now taking compounded versions of these drugs. Hims & Hers has said around 100,000 consumers have signed up for its weight-loss program, which includes compounded medications. The company’s revenue jumped by over 50 percent from the previous year in the months after it started offering access to compounded weight-loss medications.

These compounded medications cost a fraction of the list price for brand-name drugs. As the ad frames it, that’s giving consumers access to the same kind of powerful medications, free of the bureaucracy of “the system.”

Some experts disagree. “The idea that this for-profit company is not exploiting you financially because it’s making it a little bit cheaper to get knockoff Ozempic — that is a wild claim,” said Kate Manne, the author of the book “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.”

To Mr. Safdar, the ad is “like running an ad for a Cadillac and not telling anybody that the car you’re selling is made by a Yugo.” It shows injector pens that look similar to Ozempic and Wegovy, but with brand names blurred out.

He and other experts argued that the kind of oversight that comes from an institution like the F.D.A. is critical to keeping consumers safe. Hims & Hers has said that the company offers access to medications compounded from facilities registered with the F.D.A., and also provides certificates verifying a drug’s ingredients. But the F.D.A. has warned that there are risks to any compounded weight-loss drugs, including overdose.

The ad does note that the F.D.A. does not evaluate compounded drug products. That message appears briefly at the bottom of the video before the narrator implores viewers to “Join us in the fight for a healthier America!”

“It just engages in this sort of rebellious teenager language,” said Adrienne Bitar, a lecturer in American studies at Cornell University who is the author of a book on diet culture. “But this is the absolute most mainstream, capitalist endeavor you can get.”