I’ve found it hard to engage on the topic of Wegovy, because it sounds like a comedian’s pet name for Michael Gove, but as the weight loss drug arrives in the UK this week, available privately and on the NHS, I’m struck by what an amazing moment this is. An anti-obesity medicine has been big pharma’s holy grail for as long as I can remember. I once asked a bunch of GPs which disease they would eradicate if they had a magic wand and every single one of them chose type 2 diabetes.
Despite this being a breakthrough, it is going to pose an immense challenge to those, in medicine and beyond, who think of obesity as a moral failure; those who blame people living with obesity for their body shape, as well as any other condition they might have, and from there trace a direct line to any overall health system crisis. Which is almost everybody.
Obesity discourse hit peak garbage in 2021, when the then work and pensions secretary Thérèse Coffey went on Good Morning Britain to account for the fact that the UK had the highest Covid death rate in the world at the time. It was because we had an ageing population and an obesity crisis, Coffey explained. Piers Morgan leapt on this – was she saying it was our own fault for being too old and too fat? This was ironic, because fat-shaming is Morgan’s filler material, the stuff he keeps in his brain-larder for when there’s no fresh provocation in the fridge. Coffey, indignant, terminated the interview, which perhaps felt easy because it was on Zoom and all she had to do was to close her computer. Still, it wasn’t easy to watch.
That was the UK’s real obesity crisis right there – life, with its inequality and growing hardship, was one huge obesogenic condition that politicians, abetted by medics, blamed on individuals, whose failings were then re-aggregated by commentators to explain the problems of an underfunded health service.
What will these people do if obesity goes away? What earthly new casuistry will they cook up to blame poverty on the poor? No wonder Wegovy’s rollout will be “controlled and limited”; it might have this unfortunate side-effect as a scourge of bad-faith arguments.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
