The Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Health Product Advertising Regulations in Time of Corona Crisis: Comparative Study of the Iranian and British Law

The pandemic of the Coronavirus was a test for legal systems to evaluate the effectiveness of laws and regulations in the face of the crisis. Advertisement of health goods, including food, hygiene, and pharmaceutical products, is one of the areas that was severely affected by the onset of the crisis. As advertising for tourism or home appliances declined, advertisements for personal protective equipment, cleaning materials, and nutrients to boost the immune system increased. Although Iranian law prohibits promoting and advertising drugs of any kind, drugs for the treatment of Coronavirus were advertised on TV and cyberspace. In this study, by a comparative study of Iranian laws and regulations with that of Britain, as a tool for measuring, the executive power of these two legal systems has been assessed in the face of the Corona crisis. Benefiting from a self-regulatory system of oversight and the existence of quasi-judicial bodies with transparency in access to the votes in the British legal system was an advantage, whereas the conflict of competence in issuing advertising licenses and the lack of a suitable mechanism to compensate consumers in Iran indicate the ineffectiveness of laws and regulations, especially in the face of crises such as Corona.