Mehmet Oz, the television-personality doctor and Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, pitched herbal supplements and other products to his millions of social media followers without properly disclosing that he had a business relationship with the company selling them, according to a letter published Tuesday.
Oz’s undisclosed ads may have broken influencer marketing rules, the watchdog group Public Citizen wrote to the Federal Trade Commission.
Specifically, Oz is a “global advisor and stakeholder” with iHerb, which sells everything from vitamins and supplements to pet food. And though he makes that disclosure on his X and Instagram profile pages, Oz doesn’t mention anything about his connection to iHerb in the actual videos he posts about its products on social media, as required by FTC rules.
Oz pitched iHerb’s ashwagandha capsules just a few days ago, iHerb multivitamins a few days prior, and in October, he urged followers to “create a healthy foundation to defend against Halloween excesses with California Gold’s multivitamin & mineral” and plugged “exclusive discounts” for the company, which he called “my trusted source,” all without disclosing his actual business relationship to iHerb on the individual videos. In September, he plugged iHerb’s “daily deals” on products like Life Extension, “NAD+ Cell Regenerator” supplement and pecans.
“My friends, living your best life is easy to achieve when you shop at iHerb,” Trump’s pick to lead CMS said.
“[Oz’s] video posts do not disclose his financial connections, nor does the accompanying text. Nor do the posts contain other disclosures such as #ad,” said the Public Citizen letter, addressed to the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. It noted past warnings sent to other influencers over similar issues and urged the bureau to investigate whether Oz had violated FTC policy on undisclosed endorsements and product advertisements, and to “take appropriate action.”
“As you know, a longstanding, core principle of fair advertising law in the United States is that people have a right to know when they are being advertised to,” Public Citizen’s co-president Robert Weissman wrote.
The letter noted guidance from the FTC last year concerning the application of the FTC Act — which governs “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce” — to the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The guidance gave the example of an influencer “who is paid to endorse a vitamin product in their social media posts [and] discloses their connection to the product’s manufacturer only on the profile pages of their social media accounts.”
“The disclosure is not clear and conspicuous because people seeing their paid posts could easily miss the disclosure,” the guidance said.
“The logic of this rule is clear,” Weissman wrote. “Because most people will miss the disclosure in the profile page, that disclosure does not adequately inform consumers and enable them to contextualize the advertisement they are seeing as an advertisement.”
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment about the Public Citizen letter.
Oz’s potential conflicts of interest and his promotion of drugs, supplements and medical devices as a television host and social media personality could complicate his potential job in the Trump administration, as the The Washington Post and New York Times have detailed in recent days.
During a Senate hearing in 2014, for example, Oz acknowledged that claims about products he’d featured on his show “don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact,” but said he personally believed in them anyway.
And in 2019, Oz did a glowing segment on the weight-loss drug Ozempic, in which he mentioned the drug’s manufacturer, “trusted partner” Novo Nordisk. The company acknowledged sponsoring the segment to the Post, but said it didn’t have an ongoing relationship with Oz. The Post noted Oz still promotes the drug on his website, as well as another drug, iHerb’s Collagen-Up, which he describes as an answer to sagging skin resulting from weight loss, which has been called “Ozempic face.”
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If he does ultimately lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Oz could play a role in answering the open question of whether the federal government should cover weight-loss medicine for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries — particularly if the drugs help overweight patients with noncosmetic weight issues like heart problems and diabetes.
“It’s a big battle happening now” over insurance coverage for Wegovy, another weight-loss drug, Oz said in a video last November. “I think Medicare is going to be the real finish line. Are they going to cover weight-loss drugs? They’re not allowed to, by law, but Wegovy appears to do more than just help with weight loss.”
A Trump transition spokesperson told the Post that “all nominees and appointees will comply with the ethical obligations of their respective agencies.”