There was a moment a couple of years ago, as weight-loss injections first erupted into popular consciousness, when it looked as though they couldn’t possibly endure. All right-thinking people were, it seemed, reflexively horrified by the suddenly rampant use and abuse of Ozempic and its compatriots by Hollywood elites. Disturbing side-effects, including increased risks of thyroid tumours and kidney damage were being reported, pharmaceutical companies were reporting shortages in the drugs for patients with diabetes, their originally-intended recipients. It was all “dystopian”, “a nightmare”, “like an episode of Black Mirror”. “Whatever happened to the body positivity movement?” we cried. Surely, we weren’t actually going to cross this frontier?
The answer, apparently, is yes we are – and with gusto. Over the last year, weight-loss jabs have been normalised to a previously inconceivable degree. The latest iteration of this came on Tuesday, when health secretary Wes Streeting wrote in a national newspaper that drugs like Ozempic or Mounjaro could be given to unemployed people to help them get back into work. Streeting said, rather crassly, that “widening waistbands” were placing a burden on the health service, and that nearly £300 million will be invested in trials for weight-loss jabs under a new partnership between the government and US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Thought to be the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, the money will also fund research into ways to tackle the UK’s obesity crisis.
