Giving weight-loss jabs to millions of patients will help “finally defeat obesity”, the health secretary has predicted.
Wes Streeting said that the NHS must give the injections to far more people to avoid creating a two-tier service that leaves behind poorer patients.
However, he stopped short of a concrete promise to widen access to medicines that are tightly rationed by the NHS as talks continue with pharmaceutical companies over deals on pricing.
Seeking to rally party activists against the threat he said was posed to the NHS by Reform UK, he used his speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool to accuse Nigel Farage of being a “con artist”.
“Our country is being confronted with choices about who we are and what we stand for, and nowhere do those choices come together more starkly than our National Health Service,” Streeting said.
