Medscape surveyed 400 of its physician readers about patient trust. The results: Doctors high, Rx reducing, payors low.

This isn't surprising, patient surveys also say that doctors are the most trusted, but this is coming from the physicians themselves. This is the exact number University of Pennsylvania when asking patients sources of health information they trust. The KFF got 86% for a similar question.

While most doctors said that patients trust them, prescribing decisions are under more scrutiny. 44% said that trust has fallen for  their prescription recommendations.

On the flip side of the trust equation are US health insurance companies. Doctors believe that they are largely untrusted. This number was presented as "7 in 10" which could be a range of 5% up or down which is frustrating as Medscape almost certainly has the full data similar to the HCP results.

This is less of a news story and more of an observation. We expect the final X volumes to be similar to 2025. Here we have compiled data from X usage on the meeting using the official hashtags (#asco26, #asco2026).

On this chart we have total X post from different sources. The most recent numbers were captured with Meltwater (was Sysomos) from May 1 to June 30 while the early numbers come from an article in the ASCO Post. The AI estimates are from Google's AI Overviews.

* This data was captured up to June 4. This makes the 2026 data artificially low.

The 5-day ASCO event has a defined peak across the three middle days. The data we have for ASCO '25 and '26 shows similar volumes though the weekends always shift by a day per year.

Because the Wire has been tracking ASCO for so many years (with one unexplained exception -Ed.) we can show how the peak days have varied since 2018.

The flurry of FDA Warning and Notice of Violation (untitled) letters in September of last year got a lot of attention. It's back with a VAB report that shows how TV spend is up since those letters were issued. 

Brands seem to be flocking to TV, especially when you include streaming which is what VAB did here. The industry is up 10% in number of brands participating and up a whopping 94% in spend.

The therapies for different conditions tend to have consistent ISI lengths, which translates into TV spot length. We took the data in the VAP report and sorted the conditions by spot length from longest to shortest. The actual report has this broken down in more detail for the data hounds.

Reach out to the Wire author if you want a larger version of this chart or look at the full report for all the data.

The minimum spend for ChatGPT advertising continues to plummet as OpenAI looks for more revenue.  Emarketer projects that the platform's share of users should remain above 70% until 2030.

The question isn't whether pharma should try out this new platform, it's when will OpenAI allow us in? Until recently the company has had all health restricted from participating. However, an undisclosed source has told us that OTC is "coming soon." We will keep our eyes open and if you want to be among the first to know, talk to your Klick rep.

YouTube has always had more users per month than Netflix but a new report from Digital i shows that the platform now also has more minutes per user. 

All age groups, up to 55-64, increased their YouTube watch time in 2025. 

The devices these viewers use are evenly split between big screen, PC, and mobile evenly.

Pharma tends to underutilize YouTube but with the comfort with creators increasing every year, it might be time to take another look at this productive platform.

Increasing numbers of Americans are finding themselves without a family doctor according to a Harris Poll study commissioned by Health Day. The study was two waves in March and April of 2026, involving a total 4,180 people.

And those that do have one say they still can't access care.

And this lack of family medicine causes or exacerbates health issues for patients. 45% said they had one or more issues and 12% said they couldn't fill a prescription.

Biopharma Dive analyzed known pharma deals with China's biotech industry announced in 2025 and '26. They highlighted the deals in a couple of different ways.

Oncology is the largest area of research deals though metabolic gives it a run for its money.

Pharma wants in early on new therapies coming out of China. Preclinical is the largest investment phase.

Researchers at Stanford University's Institute for Internet Security submitted controlled leads through 100+ health-related sites, monitored 200 phone numbers/emails, and found health data shared with 70+ third parties. 

This ambitious test of lead gen data flows on the internet produced some results that show what happens to patients who just try and get some health insurance quotes. Here are three charts from the experiment that show the total calls, the number of retries per number (there are more than one number per company) and the timing of calls after a noon-initiated form fill.

The study also outs the different lead-gen websites by volumes of calls and emails as well. Here we have phone calls:

And emails:

If you're looking for a reason the FTC is so focused on health data being shared, this is almost certainly a contributing factor.

Forum, a new standalone app from Meta, quietly launched in May 2026 as a dedicated home for Facebook Groups. The app pulls a user's existing Groups into a single Reddit-style feed, separate from the main Facebook experience. The launch came with no event, blog post, or press push -  it was first spotted in the App Store rather than announced, a signal that Meta might be treating Forum as an experiment.

Groups are one of the primary draws to Facebook for audiences interested in health conditions. Every condition has multiple groups with the larger ones very active. Here is an example of the top groups from the many for Muscular Dystrophy.

And some of  these groups can be reasonably active. Here are posts per day for the top groups.

The intro paragraph is also the intro to our Media Team's POV on Forum. The team recommends hold and monitor but highlights the possible benefit to pharma marketers:

Comscore released a now-rare report for the measurement firm. This one is on GenAI systems usage. The researchers showed two charts, one for ChatGPT with 55% year-over-year growth and one for Claude with 1,858% YoY growth.

Claude, however, enjoys the "low denominator" position so its growth can be misleading if taken without context. So, we combined the two charts into one and mapped the Claude data on top of the ChatGPT data.

Claude's 22 million conversations is a bit under 10% of ChatGPT's 244 million. This flies in the face of the Ramp AI index that found Claude surpassing OpenAI ... but it was measuring companies that pay for LLM access and was comparing percentages. 

The Comscore data also had some unlabeled demographic usage charts. These at least show the relative volumes for the different age groups on both desktop and mobile. 

FleishmanHillard conducted a global online survey in late December to 4,000 engaged consumers, 1,400 executives and 150 policy stakeholders across 15 markets. This survey was positioned to determine how these three groups see trust in companies and coherence in their actions.

This type of research is important to highlight the connection between C-Suite actions, the company image, and consumer behaviors. For the last point, consumers were asked what they have done when a company's actions cause them to lose confidence in it:

Will a patient actually change a therapy only because a company was in the news? Unlikely. But every factor matters when making decisions and 88% of US consumers say they are more willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt if it has a good reputation.

When asked how much trust they have in different groups, scientific "institutions" take the top spot. To be sure, pharma companies aren't institutions but it might be possible to partner with trusted groups.

The top three qualities that consumers look for in corporate leadership are the same ones that generate trust: Ability, Benevolence, and Integrity (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman).

Unfortunately, consumers do not see companies acting on these qualities very often.

This report does our favorite thing and includes data tables at the end. If you deal with the reputation of a company or brand this information is useful. 

This year's wearables survey from Rock Health included 8,000 US citizens during December. Looking at the ownership trends we note that the numbers have been flat since around 2021.

The types of devices start with smartwatches, of course and smart scales for the "connected devices" side of the report. Rings are still down around 6% even with Oura being 13 years old.

With Oura planning an IPO it remains to be seen if the company can convince investors that it can break into the wearable population from its current 6% share.