‘The weight is over,’ read an advert on the side of a bus outside my hospital this morning. The first really effective pill for weight loss has now been on sale in Britain for just over a month.
Wegovy – it has the same brand name as its injectable equivalent – is a semaglutide. Ozempic is the same drug at a lower dose, sold to treat diabetes. Mounjaro is more effective than Wegovy but is injection-only. Lilly hopes its rival pill – Foundayo, orforglipron – will soon be licensed here; already it’s on sale in America. Drugs have a brand name, which is capitalised, and a generic name, which is not. (An odd exception is aspirin, which was Bayer’s trade name, but which they largely lost as the result of the first world war. Since, as part of the conglomerate I. G. Farben, they started bankrolling the Nazis from 1933, we need not feel sorry for them.)
You can’t get oral Wegovy on the NHS, at least not yet, but demand in the private sector has been huge. Boots reported thousands of completed online consultations even in advance of the 6 July launch. Chemist4U said its waiting list ran into the tens of thousands. Private Britain has embraced a medical revolution – the NHS, in contrast, is rationing it almost into oblivion.
