The Nice Ozempic Rip-off

A lot of the meals in America comes from only a few crops like corn, wheat, soy, and canola, largely as a result of farming subsidies that pressure farmers to mass-produce these crops and promote them under price. These low-cost crops are then was the processed meals we eat each day. That is problematic as a result of:

For years, activists like Dr. Mercola have pushed for consciousness of the significance of pure meals and the necessity to change farming subsidies to advertise wholesome consuming. The present media local weather, pushed by skepticism of the COVID-19 response and the rise of impartial media, has revealed the systematic failures in our meals provide and allowed these long-cultivated concepts to start bursting into public consciousness.

For instance, a couple of weeks in the past, shortly after gaining the nationwide highlight and the necessity to make America Wholesome Once more by releasing us from pervasive regulatory corruption, RFK Jr. was invited onto Fox Information to debate the hazards of seed oils and synthetic meals colorings with a supportive newscaster — one thing I’d by no means earlier than seen within the nationwide media.

Pharmaceutical Gross sales

Once in a while, we get a clue about what goes on behind the scenes within the pharmaceutical trade (e.g., see this text and this text concerning the sociopathic sales-focused tradition inside Pfizer). One notably telling occasion was a presentation GSK gave their gross sales reps for Advair, which I imagine is consultant of the mentality of this trade:

Final yr Kim Witczak,² a pharmaceutical security advocate, tipped me off about JP Morgan’s annual healthcare convention, a personal invitation-only occasion described by JP Morgan as “the trade’s largest gathering.” The forty first convention, from January 9-12, 2023, was the primary occasion hosted in particular person for the reason that pandemic began.

Given this occasion’s immense affect on the pharmaceutical sector (because it caters to giant traders), it’s necessary to focus on a couple of issues that had been introduced on the convention web site.³ First, think about how enthusiastically they endorsed the profitability of two new kinds of medicine:

In that video, crucial half was Chase’s projections for this new trade:

Word: The GLP-1 medicine embrace Trulicity, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Byetta, and Ozempic.⁴

Second, think about who the keynote audio system at Chase’s convention had been:

Word: After I initially publicized this convention, elements of it had been deleted (e.g., one of many above movies and Califf being listed because the keynote speaker). Califf has lengthy been an extremely controversial FDA commissioner as a result of his immense pharmaceutical conflicts of curiosity.⁵

To repeat — the top of the FDA was a keynote speaker to traders concerning the extremely profitable alternative they may count on from these new medicine — implying that the FDA would do every thing it may to push them via. Because it so occurred, to cite Witczak:

“Fascinating to additionally observe, Califf was the keynote speaker on opening day and out of the blue, the FDA granted accelerated approval to the second controversial Biogen Alzheimer drug on Friday [three days before the conference] with out an Advisory Committee. How nice to have the ability to announce to the healthcare biotech trade that considered one of their new medicine was simply granted accelerated approval.”

Word: An much more controversial approval had proceeded it⁶ (the place the FDA overrode its personal panel to approve an costly, harmful, and ineffective Alzheimer’s drug which resulted in three of the specialists on the panel resigning, with one stating it was “most likely the worst drug approval determination in latest US historical past”).

Shortly afterward, the FDA gave a glowing press launch on their approval of the drug⁷ — however as a result of how unsafe and ineffective the drug was, even with the FDA’s endorsement, quite than turn into the subsequent blockbuster drug, it abjectly failed available in the market and is now being discontinued by the producer.⁸ For these , I mentioned the immense scandal with present Alzheimer’s medicine and the suppression of confirmed (however un-patentable) therapies for the illness right here.

The Rise of Ozempic (Semaglutide)

As soon as I noticed this convention, provided that it units the course for all the trade, I grew to become satisfied that Ozempic would quickly be aggressively marketed, with the FDA backing the growth of its use. This prediction shortly grew to become a actuality, with widespread promotion and endorsements of the drug, paying homage to the beginning of the opioid disaster.

Right here for example, are excerpts of two broadly seen interviews by Casey and Calley Means describing the staggering corruption that has facilitated Ozempic’s fast rise all through America:

Sadly, the marketing campaign has been so profitable that there is now a scarcity of Ozempic,⁹ driving folks to hunt alternate options.¹⁰ The push to broaden Ozempic’s market has focused numerous demographics, together with:

1. African Individuals — Ozempic’s producer paid civil rights teams to foyer for the drug, framing any opposition as perpetuating systemic racism.^11,12

2. Youngsters — The FDA authorized semaglutide for overweight youngsters 12 and older¹³ simply earlier than the Chase convention regardless of issues about long-term results, and on the primary day of the Chase convention, the American Academy of Pediatrics printed a set of authoritative set of tips¹⁴ for treating childhood weight problems which strongly endorsed giving them the GLP-1’s:

3. The aged — One main impediment to promoting Ozempic is its excessive price ($1,000 to $1,500 per 30 days), making it unaffordable with out insurance coverage. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 prohibits Medicare from overlaying weight reduction medicine, however the trade has been lobbying to overturn this.

An “weight problems rights” coalition, (funded by Ozempic’s producer),¹⁵ has efficiently superior a regulation via committee to permit Medicare protection,¹⁶ which may price between $3.1 to $6 billion yearly if handed.¹⁷

This raises a vital query: Why was Medicare initially prohibited from overlaying weight problems therapies?

The Rise and Fall of Fen-Phen

A recurring theme I’ve explored is how medical catastrophes usually repeat as a result of we overlook the teachings from the previous. The present rush for Ozempic is strikingly much like the fen-phen catastrophe of the Nineties. Phentermine¹⁸ (launched to the USA in 1959) and fenfluramine¹⁹ (launched to the USA in 1973) had been two marginally efficient weight reduction medicine that by no means caught on.

In 1979, a professor of medical pharmacology and director of an FDA division for approving new medicine believed weight problems wanted to be handled as a medical (quite than way of life) illness and determined to see in the event that they’d work higher as soon as mixed.²⁰ Fen-phen “labored,” and when his examine was lastly printed 20 years later, it immediately grew to become wildly common.

As phrase unfold, demand surged, turning many medical doctors’ places of work into capsule mills²¹ catering to determined sufferers. Nonetheless, it wasn’t lengthy earlier than the drug was linked to extreme coronary heart valve harm²² and pulmonary hypertension,²³ resulting in its removing from the market and billions of {dollars} in authorized settlements. Remarkably, as soon as the mud had settled, the FDA official who pushed Fen-Phen onto the market admitted it by no means occurred to him to confirm the drug mixture was certainly secure.²⁴

What’s notably alarming is that lots of the points we see right now with Ozempic — aggressive advertising and marketing, off-label makes use of, and a deal with revenue over affected person security — mirror the errors made with fen-phen. Again then, the FDA finally stepped in to ban the drug after realizing the extent of the hurt it brought about, however this time round, the FDA as a substitute is working with the trade to push these medicine.

The Dangers and Advantages of Ozempic

Previous to the GLP-1s being marketed as anti-obesity medicine, lots of my colleagues believed they had been fairly useful for diabetes. Provided that a few of these colleagues had been pretty conservative with which medicine they’d use and wonderful clinicians, I took their opinions into critical consideration.

Nonetheless, I additionally observed that I used to be repeatedly seeing sufferers develop uncommon gastrointestinal problems from the medicine (together with one hospitalization of a distant relative), so I held to the attitude the medicine had been too new for his or her dangers to be absolutely appreciated.

After they began getting used as weight reduction brokers (the place their dose is way increased — 0.5 mg to 1.0 mg vs. 1.7 mg to 2.4 mg — continuously being virtually 5 instances larger), we began noticing that we’d see increasingly more sufferers who ought to have by no means been prescribed the drug and are taking sufficient of it (usually even overdosing) to drive themselves into cachexia.²⁵

These sufferers are straightforward to establish as they don’t look regular and have a considerably sick and considerably anorexic look since they’re ravenous themselves. That is finest demonstrated by what has come to be often called the “Ozempic Face”:

Word: Many healthcare professionals at the moment are noticing an epidemic of Ozempic facilitated consuming problems.²⁶

I then regarded into the information on the GLP-1 medicine and observed a curious sample — similar to fen-phen, the burden misplaced was quickly regained as soon as the drug was stopped. For example, listed below are a couple of graphs from the pivotal trials of those medicine.

First, utilizing the complete (2.4 mg) dose of Wegovy (which like Ozempic is one other identify for semaglutide) every week, inadvertently exhibits that many of the contributors couldn’t keep on the medicine for a chronic interval:²⁷

Second, when given to youngsters, they started regaining their misplaced weight as soon as they stopped the drug:²⁸

Third, when the consequences of withdrawing the drug had been examined,²⁹ the misplaced weight was clearly proven to return (alongside a gradual decline within the quantity of people that may keep on the drug):

Word: The burden regained³⁰ was proportional to the burden initially misplaced.

Briefly, having to spend 1000 {dollars} a month for a little bit of weight reduction, which then disappears when you cease the drug, is probably not the very best deal.

Conversely, I believe a key cause why this facet impact has been publicized is that the purpose of the pharmaceutical trade is all the time to have numerous folks perpetually utilizing a excessive revenue margin product (e.g., a month-to-month course of the thousand greenback Ozempic prices lower than 5 {dollars} to make),³¹ so any product which doesn’t repair the underlying difficulty however creates insupportable withdrawals when one stops (e.g., the SSRI antidepressants or the PPI acid reflux disease medicines) is “good for enterprise.”

Sadly, along with being a rip-off, Ozempic has a couple of main points. First, the GLP-1 medicine had been designed to withstand being damaged down inside the physique, so they’d solely should be injected as soon as every week (ensuing of their common half-life being roughly seven days, whereas the pure GLP-1 protein has a half-life between 1.5 to five minutes³²).

For the reason that GLP-1 is accountable for slowing digestion within the physique, medicine like Ozempic considerably sluggish digestion and might create quite a lot of gastrointestinal points from doing so (e.g., a examine of 25,617 real-world sufferers discovered these medicine trigger a 3.5 instances improve within the price of intestinal obstruction³³).

Second, extreme unintended effects are fairly widespread. Probably the most complete examine³⁴ I’ve discovered of the extreme unintended effects of GLP-1 medicine (e.g., Ozempic) sourced from 16 million sufferers’ medical data discovered that the medicine had been strongly linked to quite a lot of unintended effects that continuously required hospitalization. Particularly, when in comparison with one other weight reduction mixture not sometimes related to these results, GLP-1 customers had been discovered to have:

• 9.09 instances larger threat of pancreatitis
• 4.22 instances larger threat of bowel obstruction
• 3.67 instances larger threat of gastroparesis (which implies you’ll be able to barely eat as a result of the abdomen is consistently full — and in lots of instances after Ozempic, finally ends up being everlasting)
• 1.48 instances larger threat of biliary illness (e.g., painful gallstones)

Third, extreme hostile occasions are sometimes a lot rarer than average or minor ones. Given how frequent these extreme results are, it ought to come as no shock that much less extreme ones are much more widespread. For instance, think about a examine³⁵ of 175 folks on the burden loss dose of Ozempic:

Likewise, think about what number of hostile occasions³⁶ had been acknowledged inside a trial sponsored by Ozempic’s producer:

Sadly, these aren’t the one unintended effects. For instance, along with lawsuits being filed towards Ozempic for gastrointestinal problems corresponding to gastroparesis, lawsuits are additionally rising³⁷ for different extreme circumstances corresponding to imaginative and prescient loss.

Moreover, animal experiments are exhibiting³⁸ it distorts the structure of the small gut (which might result in poor nutrient absorption or power intestinal obstructions), and lots of the GLP-1 drug labels state the medicine could also be linked to thyroid most cancers.

Word: In a earlier sequence, I mentioned one of many largest points with the SSRI antidepressants — as a result of they’re given at a really excessive dose, people continuously expertise extreme withdrawals³⁹ when their dose is modified. These withdrawals, in flip can set off suicidal conduct, psychosis, or violent conduct, which is usually homicidal (and a standard theme behind college shootings).

A serious difficulty with Ozempic is that because it slows the speed at which the abdomen empties, it alters and delays the absorption of psychiatric medicines. For the reason that customers are sometimes very delicate to modifications of their dose, many reviews now exist on-line of serious psychiatric destabilization occurring in Ozempic customers who had been additionally on psychiatric medicines.

This may increasingly partially, clarify why a examine⁴⁰ discovered that Ozempic brought about a forty five% elevated threat of suicidal ideation, and that elevated to 345% in those that had been already taking SSRI antidepressants.

What Causes Weight problems

In America’s case, it’s very clear that weight problems has been repeatedly rising and that, like many different power diseases, we haven’t been given a proof for why it’s occurring.

Affordable explanations for this improve embrace:

Nonetheless, quite than taking these into critical consideration, we’re merely being informed the true reply is a lifetime of Ozempic. Thankfully nonetheless, the altering political panorama is providing an actual hope to reverse this tide of weight problems and corruption we face.

Conclusion

The Ozempic story is egregious, however it additionally critically illuminates a reality most healthcare professionals don’t admire — medical tips are largely a product of financial issues quite than scientific proof.

Thankfully, nature all the time has a approach of bringing issues again into steadiness, and because the corruption inside our medical system has reached the purpose of absurdity and increasingly more clearly harmful medicine are being pushed onto the general public by our regulators, the general public is awakening to their lies and turning into much less and receptive to “trusting the specialists.” On this vein, I imagine the Ozempic state of affairs is a pivotal second in time, because the tables have turned for the reason that instances of Fen-Phen.

Now, quite than the resistance to its deployment upon the populace coming from the regulators, it’s generated by on a regular basis Individuals who don’t need these pointless and damaging medicine pushed on their youngsters.

Word: That is an abridged article. In the complete model, I focus on the above factors in additional element and discover the causes of meals cravings alongside pure strategies for restoring metabolic well being and regaining a wholesome weight. For extra sources and hyperlinks on this topic, click on right here.

A Word from Dr. Mercola In regards to the Creator

A Midwestern Physician (AMD) is a board-certified doctor and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I admire AMD’s distinctive perception on a variety of subjects, and I am grateful to share them with them. I additionally respect AMD’s need to stay nameless since AMD continues to be on the entrance traces treating sufferers. To seek out extra of AMD’s work, remember to try The Forgotten Facet of Medication on Substack.

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