Diabetes sufferers fear shortages of drug after influencers say it helps lose weight

There are thousands of videos on Tik Tok telling people to take Ozempic, a drug used to treat diabetes, as a way to lose weight. Doctors and people who need the drug to manage their diabetes are now worried about shortages. © Observers

There are thousands of videos on TikTok that claim that you can miraculously lose weight by taking Ozempic, a medicine meant to be used by people with diabetes. As a result, there has been a massive rise in sales of Ozempic worldwide. Now, both doctors and people with diabetes are afraid that the drug's popularity as a weight loss aid will lead to shortages.

There are now thousands of videos on TikTok with the hashtag #ozempic featuring women who demonstrate how much weight they’ve lost since they started injecting this drug, which reduces the feeling of hunger. Some of these videos have garnered more than three million views.