Australia’s medical regulator has cracked down on health and wellness influencers, who will no longer be able to shill testimonials for “therapeutic goods” in exchange for cash or any other material benefit. Health influencing as a practice, however, is here to stay.In an update to advertising guidelines that come into effect in July, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) warned that influencers involved in a business’s marketing strategy would no longer be able to be paid to offer up their own personal experience with a number of health products, with a view to entice their followers.Among the products that are now off the cards for influencers are all medicines and medical devices, vitamins and supplements, and other general health products. The updated code will not apply to food and cosmetics more broadly.More generic product placements, like a product that appears in the background of a shot, in some cases may still be legal. Central to the change isn’t that health influencing is now illegal, but instead that influencers will no longer be allowed to make nefarious claims about the products they’re advertising that might not have been tested or approved. In other words: anyone on Instagram can still “endorse” a product, as long as they don’t back that endorsement with a “testimonial”. The regulator’s updated guidelines are set to puncture what has become a multi-million dollar industry in Australia, where some influencers have come to count on shilling health and wellness products for the majority of their income. Over the weekend, influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube came out in droves to bemoan the changes, saying the updated code will cripple their earnings and be a “big hit on businesses”. Experts, on the other hand, were unsurprisingly supportive. They said the move should go a long way to cleaning up Australia’s health information ecosystem.Dr Ian Musgrave, a senior lecturer of medicine at the University of Adelaide, said the change was bound to come sooner or later, particularly when the storm of medical mis- and disinformation that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. “Until now, social media influencers have been largely left alone, but now the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has stepped in,” Dr Musgrave said. “Any treatment (from skin cream to vitamins) that makes a therapeutic claim is regulated by the TGA, and there are strict rules around the advertising of therapeutic goods. Now the TGA is turning its attention to influencers, who from July 1 will be banned from promoting health products if they are paid or incentivised, including receiving gifted products,” he said.“While this may seem heavy-handed, advertising therapeutics, even ones as innocuous as sunscreen, requires high ethical standards.”Follow John on Twitter.Read more from VICE Australia.
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