Darren Burrell, division lead of corporate risk intelligence at risk analysis company Revolver, and Lisa Anderson, who advises pharma companies on shifting media strategies at WE Communications, have been getting a lot of work lately.
“There’s land mines everywhere,” Anderson said in a panel Tuesday during the Fierce Pharma Week 2025 conference in Philadelphia.
She was referring, of course, to the turbulent political landscape that’s currently rocking existing status quos and shaping how the biopharmaceutical industry interacts with the public, the government and each other. For those on the front lines of communicating corporate strategy, the winds of change have dredged up new priorities, new standards and new challenges.
Moderated by Bo Piela, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals’ vice president of enterprise and executive communications, the panel discussion saw seasoned industry communications leaders delving into the strategies they’ve honed while navigating an uncertain policy landscape over the past year.
To hear Piela tell it, just some of the themes at the heart of the chaos include mass layoffs at the FDA, proposed tariffs on imported medicines, regulatory threats to vaccine development and more.
“We’re writing the playbook as we go,” Piela said, referencing the changing priorities of pharma comms teams.
It’s a world of politics-induced strategy changes that Anderson, for one, has been “living and breathing” since January. Before then, things were more familiar, according to Lara Ramsburg, Viatris’ chief corporate affairs officer.
Ramsburg has been in the corporate affairs game for Viatris and its parent company Mylan for more than a decade now. “You could have a sense of what was coming,” she said, but now, communications teams must be adaptable, “because it’s going to come fast, and it’s going come in ways in which you can’t predict.”
For example, these days, it’s not an unusual occurrence for the U.S. president to pen an open letter to a dozen industry CEOs before sending it to individual companies, Carrie Fernandez, Bristol Myers Squibb’s VP of corporate communications, pointed out. And that may very well continue over the next couple of years, meaning media teams will have to figure out how to “sort of live with it,” she said.
Central to the growing pains is a cloud of skepticism coloring communications. It’s a new world to navigate, one “where facts are questioned,” Burrell noted.
FDA's new "North Star"
Of course, drugmakers aren’t the only ones impacted by the new comms environment in play.
Shannon Hatch spent five years handling media relations at the FDA, most recently as the agency’s deputy assistant commissioner for media affairs, before it dumped its entire media team in April. The FDA previously had its own press division, 20-strong, in charge of responding to media inquiries and broadcasting the agency’s “North Star” messaging of “always follow the science,” Hatch said during the panel.
Under its new leadership, the FDA and the broader Department of Health and Human Services now instead lean into the White House message of “returning to gold-standard science,” as is broadly displayed across FDA press releases and orders. The administration’s “undercurrent of messaging,” as Hatch said, is that “pharma is the bad guy.”
To battle back against this narrative, Hatch suggested two possible routes. One would be to use the “major voice” that the industry already has to loudly promote their goals of improving patients’ health. On the other hand, she said, it may be in industry communicators’ best interest to “look for common ground.”
The latter option is a path already taken by many. Anderson referred to a similar concept as “safe storytelling”: For example, it may not be a coincidence that pharma leaders are talking up their manufacturing and job-creating initiatives more often these days, as they’re topics that align with the administration’s own priorities.
And the U.S. isn’t the only territory in rocky political waters. The swirling threats to the industry are rippling outward on a global scale as President Donald Trump looks to tie U.S. drug prices to those in other countries, sparking a debate in the U.K., for one, about the state of the region’s innovation and competitive environment.
Given the widespread implications of U.S. events, global companies will have to operate under “one strong company strategy and voice,” Fernandez said.