| dc.description.abstract | With the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, consumers′ purchasing behavior has been shifting to online shopping. The controversy of advertisement involving medical efficacy is increasing with popularity and coverage of the Internet. Due to the diversification and complexity of commodities nowadays, the attribute and category of commodities is getting blurred, and it is difficult to know whether commodities are subject to specific regulations such as the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act (PAA), the Medical Device Act (MDA) or the Fair Trade Act (FTA). Whether there will be normative concurrence or conflict? How should the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) coordinate with the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) to the enforcement? These issues are necessary to be discussed further.
According to the endless cases emerging in the content of advertisement that related to medical efficacy, this study starts from reviewing rules including Article 69 of the PAA, Article 46 of the MDA and Article 21 of the FTA. This study comprehensively compares rules that mentioned above with the legislations, normative subjects and enforcement, and analyzes the coordination and cases between the MOHW and the FTC, so as to find out the proliferation of advertisements involving medical efficacy nowadays, and address on how to regulate such advertisements more effectively.
The findings of this study are as follows: the definitions and elements of health-related rules are not clear; it’s difficult to comply the regulations for enterprises but easily escape the reviewing process of medicament advertisement; without making appropriate rules for endorsers to regulate the influencers, The recognition of jurisdiction between the agencies are not consistent, so that the phenomenon of mutual buck-passing leads to the ineffectiveness of enforcement on medical efficacy advertisements.
Finally, the suggestions of this study are as follows: regulators should modify the definitions and elements of the health-related rules and regulations; making guidelines for illustrative examples and establishing relevant norms for influencersto enhance the enforcement. In terms of implementation, to set up an inquiry platform for reporting medical efficacy advertisement to avoid the MOHW and the FTC handling duplicate cases; to establish a coordination handling group or center to improve the effectiveness of enforcement; to assign a specific agency for the authority of handling advertisement to avoid the phenomenon of controversy and mutual buck-passing between these two agencies. | en_US |