Novo Nordisk – the manufacturer of the “miracle” weight-loss drug Wegovy (also known as Ozempic) – is using racial factors to insist on government funding for their drug in the United States. The company is using a network of paid medical affiliates to push pharmaceutical treatment of obesity, including Dr Fatima Cody Stanford, who recently appeared on 60 Minutes to promote the idea that weight loss is unachievable in the traditional manner. The company also appears to be funding pro-Wegovy research articles that contain a racial bent.
Novo is following a similar strategy in other countries, including the United Kingdom, where an Observer investigation revealed the company to be bankrolling National Health Service (NHS) weight-loss services in an effort to boost sales of their drugs. Novo made payments of £21.7 million to UK health organisations and professionals in a period of just three years before the approval of Wegovy under Britain’s socialized healthcare system.
Medical professionals closely affiliated to the company have also made media appearances, including on the BBC’s flagship Radio 4 Today show, to argue that appetite-suppressing drugs like Wegovy are “one of the most powerful pharmaceutical tools” we have to treat obesity.
Although semaglutide – the pharmaceutical name for the drug – was originally designed as a treatment for Type 2 diabetes, for which it is marketed as Ozempic, buzz about its weight-loss effects have quickly grown. The drug is injected and works by mimicking a natural gut hormone called GLP-1, which regulates insulin and blood sugar levels. You feel fuller for longer, curbing hunger pangs. If you stop feeling hungry, you stop eating, and if you stop eating, you start losing weight.
By 2020, Wegovy had already been prescribed four million times in the US alone, making it the nation’s 129th most commonly prescribed medication. After a shortage of Wegovy in the United States, doctors began prescribing Ozempic, which contains a lower dose of semaglutide, off-label, as a fat-loss treatment. Similar shortages have also been reported elsewhere, including in Australia. In the first nine months of 2022, Novo Nordisk reported a 59 percent growth in sales of its semaglutide drugs. Social media sites, especially TikTok and Instagram, are now awash with videos about semaglutide and its miraculous effects. The hashtag “#ozempic” has hundreds of millions of views on TikTok alone.
PHARMA INFLUENCERS.
The drug’s growing popularity has been massively bolstered by high-profile admissions of its use, including by Elon Musk, who recently debuted a much trimmer-looking physique, and by speculation about which other celebrities have used it. Kim Kardashian is rumored to have used Wegovy to lose enough weight to almost fit into one of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dresses.
The news that Novo Nordisk is using every available means to boost sales of Wegovy will be no surprise to anybody who knows anything about how the pharmaceutical industry works. The fact the company is so brazenly “playing the race card” may still come as something of a shock. Pharmaceutical companies are moving with the times, and that includes adapting to the increasingly Critical Race Theory-heavy realm of public discourse, and making ever-greater use of social media to recruit customers.
The National Pulse recently reported on the shady networks of “patient-influencers” used by companies like Novo Nordisk to sell drugs without the mediation of a physician. These patient-influencers dispense health advice on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, including recommendations for medication for conditions they claim to suffer from. Many of these individuals are affiliated with drug companies and receive payment for their services.
“The bottom line here is that patient influencers act as a form of interactive direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, sharing their knowledge and experiences on pharmaceutical drugs with communities of followers in which they wield great influence,” said Erin Willis, author of a new study on patient-influencers.
“This raises ethical questions that need more investigation.”
DTC advertising allows drug manufacturers to target consumers directly, rather than through physicians. This method of advertising emerged in the 1980s, and is only prevalent in the US and New Zealand. In these countries, about half of all people who ask their doctor about a new drug do so after seeing a television commercial for it.
OBESITY AND RACE.
Obesity is one of the main besetting illnesses of modern life in the developed world. A recent study in the Journal of Obesity focused on the long-term weight gain of nearly 15,000 adults in the US, finding that one-fifth of US adults gained 20 percent of their body weight over 10 years.
According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41.9 percent of adults are now obese, a significant increase from the 30.5 percent who were obese at the turn of the millennium. The prevalence of severe adult obesity has increased to 9.2 percent from 4.7 percent. Nearly 15 million, or 19.7 percent of US children are now obese, and 12.7 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds, 20.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds, and 22.2 percent of 12- to 19-year-olds are now obese. The estimated medical cost of obesity in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019.
With such an enormous potential market, it is no wonder that Novo Nordisk is pulling out all the stops to corner as much of the market as possible for its weight-loss drug Wegovy. In particular, Novo wants the U.S. Congress to add coverage of obesity drugs and “weight-related behavioural therapy” to Medicare, and is pushing on a variety of different fronts to get this to happen. Novo is the largest industry donor to the Obesity Action Coalition, which is responsible for a variety of advocacy campaigns and works regularly with groups like the National Urban League and The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
“Unfortunately, outdated Medicare rules deny access to the full continuum of care for patients,” said a Novo spokesman in a statement. “Novo Nordisk has supported the expansion of Medicare for almost a decade, including support for the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act since its introduction in 2013. Novo Nordisk joined the Obesity Care Advocacy Network in 2015.”
Using a racial angle to approach the issue of public funding to tackle obesity, in consultation with groups like the NAACP, is a smart strategy, and one that other corporations have already used. A former lobbyist at Coca-Cola recently came forward with the claim that the company paid the NAACP to engage in a slander campaign of racism accusations against scientists, researchers and any opponents of Coca-Cola who claimed soft drinks were to blame for obesity.
“Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding,” said the former lobbyist. “I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room.”
“The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP and other civil rights groups to call opponents racist. Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation – both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association (ABA).”
The NAACP has been claiming that obesity in the US is rooted in systemic racism for decades. The NAACP has openly stated that “ongoing systems of oppression are at the root of health inequities”. And it certainly is true that racial and ethnic minorities suffer from obesity disproportionately. For instance, 38.9 percent of Hispanic children and 32.5 percent of non-Hispanic black children are either overweight or have obesity, whereas 28.5 percent of non-Hispanic white children are overweight or have obesity.
In a Novo document circulated in February 2021, entitled “The Disproportionate Impact of Obesity on Racial and Ethnic Minorities”, the company clearly states that it believes obesity is disproportionately affecting racial and ethnic minorities due to structural inequality. This will become more of a problem for the nation, the document states, since “minorities will make up more than half of the population of the United States by 2050.”
“Obesity is caused by a combination of genetic, biological, and environmental factors. Access to affordable, healthy food, safe places to exercise and play, stable and affordable housing, and quality health care, all play a role in the likelihood that a person will have obesity.”
The document ends with a recommendation that, “as policymakers look to address the broader health equity issues in their states, treating and reducing obesity must be a focus.”
Novo has also funded scholarly research claiming that “structural racism remains a major contributor to health disparities between African American people and the general population, and it limits access to healthy foods, safe spaces to exercise, adequate health insurance, and medication.” The research recommends increasing access to “pharmacotherapy”, i.e. weight-loss drugs like Wegovy.
Dr Fatima Cody Stanford made headlines for an appearance on 60 Minutes, discussing the failures of traditional weight-loss strategies, while claiming we should throw willpower “out the window”.
“The number one cause of obesity is genetics,” she claimed. “That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85 percent likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management.” Her statements were a clear endorsement of pharmaceutical intervention to treat obesity.
What Dr Stanford failed to mention is that she has received tens of thousands of dollars from Novo Nordisk – that we know about, since payments after 2021 are not yet available to view. Over a third of her registered payments in 2021 came from Novo, and she also received fees from Eli Lilly, which makes a competitor drug to Wegovy that works in a similar manner. Dr Stanford has also argued in speeches and academic work that government funding to treat obesity with drugs like Wegovy is necessary to fight systemic racism.
ANTI-RACISM GRIFT: NOTHING NEW.
The anti-racism grift is nothing new. Just look at Black Lives Matter, an organization which claims to have been founded to enrich the lives of ordinary black people, but instead seems only to have enriched a handful of executives. The fact that Novo Nordisk is now hammering systemic racism as a means to fill its coffers with drug money should not surprise us. In 2023, claiming that any form of inequality is somehow rooted in racism is par for the course, and usually successful – at least if you’re arguing in favor of non-whites.
What is especially concerning about the lobbying for Wegovy is that this is a drug that most users will probably have to remain on indefinitely in order to maintain weight loss. We have no idea what the long-term health effects of the drug will be, though we do know users regularly suffer unpleasant gastrointestinal problems including nausea, diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, and heartburn. Rodent studies have shown the drug can cause thyroid tumours, which should at least give us pause before we consider allowing tens of millions of people, including children, to take the drug regularly for years or even decades.
Wegovy is the modern pharmaceutical product par excellence. In a sense it represents everything that is simultaneously wrong and right with the medical industry today. Yes, we have a pioneering application of science that could benefit people’s lives, but it does so in an ad-hoc manner, without addressing any of the fundamental underlying causes of the problem itself. Obesity is the besetting disease of industrial society. It is a product of the unprecedented lifestyle and nutrition changes we’ve undergone over the last century and a half. We’ve effectively severed the chain of hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of years of human and hominid evolution, reducing our physical activity levels to a mere fraction of what they once were and abandoning the nutrition-dense predominantly animal foods that our ancestors ate and thrived upon.
While factors like genetics and social deprivation are obviously causes of unhealthy lifestyles, the simple truth is that our modern lifestyles are maladaptive. That is why we are so ill. And until we face up to this fundamental fact and abandon ad-hoc responses like anti-depressants and Wegovy, nothing will really change – except, of course, Novo Nordisk’s share price. Which will only continue to increase.
