After Lady Gaga shared her latest commercial for Pfizer’s migraine medication Nurtec ODT on Instagram earlier this week, many of her fans flocked to the comments section to criticize her partnership with the Big Pharma. But they’re not the only ones who have a bone to pick with the superstar.
Gaga’s two posts about the ad appear to have violated the EU’s laws against direct-to-consumer marketing for prescription drugs, Politico reports.
Though the singer included a disclaimer in both posts that the content was “intended for U.S. audiences only,” they reportedly were not geofenced for display only within the confines of the U.S. This means they were readily accessible to Lady Gaga's 56.5 million followers around the globe—and therefore illegal under the EU’s recently enacted laws around online content, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Those regulations allow the E.U. to step in only after the potentially illegal content has been reported to the platform on which it’s hosted—in this case Meta, the parent company of Instagram.
“If then content is not removed, the Commission can take action and pursue the case,” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the European Commission’s “A Europe Fit for the Digital Age” department, told Politico. “The DSA and the DMA are only as strong as we can collectively make them. And we count on the community to help us enforce.”
As of Friday morning, Gaga’s Nurtec ODT Instagram posts remained in place.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to Fierce Pharma Marketing’s request for comment.
This isn’t the first time that Pfizer-related social media posts have come under fire across the pond. Just last month, for example, a panel convened by the U.K.’s Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) determined that the Big Pharma had breached five clauses of the code thanks to a handful of retweets in 2020.
That case began when five U.K.-based Pfizer employees reposted a tweet from a U.S. colleague in November 2020 touting the success of the company’s then-new COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Their retweets brought the post under PMCPA jurisdiction, and the watchdog ultimately found that they did indeed constitute a violation of the regulatory code, including Clause 2, the code’s most serious, which accuses violators of having brought discredit upon or reduced confidence in the pharma industry.