The New Generation Weight Loss Drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro): Magic Bullets or Toxic Junk?

There's been a lot of hype recently about a new class of drugs that started out as anti-diabetic medications, but have become famous for their weight loss effects.

I’m talking, of course, about Ozempic and Wegovy (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide).

Ozempic and Wegovy are marketed by Novo Nordisk. In the company's trials, semaglutide produced weight losses of 14.85% to 17.4% over 68 weeks, compared to 2.4%-5% for placebo over the same period.

Even bigger weight losses are being claimed for Eli Lilly's Mounjaro (tirzepatide). In a recent press release, the company reported mean weight losses of 26-28% over 72-88 weeks in 2 yet-to-be-published trials.

Relentless hype from media outlets and celebrity influencers has been linked to an international shortage of the drugs, which cost a whopping $1,000 to $1,300 a month. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk shares have spiked upwards, and as other companies scramble to get their me-too drugs to market, analysts are predicting annual sales of up to $100 billion within a decade.

So How Does this Stuff Work?

Semaglutide is what's known as a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist, or GLP-1RA. It is chemically similar to a human hormone (GLP-1) that increases the production of insulin (strike yet another blow to the insulin hypothesis of weight gain). This GLP-1-mimicking effect is the key to the drug's anti-diabetic effects.

As for weight loss, semaglutide reduces food intake by slowing down digestion in the stomach, in turn lowering appetite. The drug does not appear to have any effect on energy expenditure, therefore does not work by "boosting" metabolism.

Semaglutide, in the form of Novo Nordisk's Ozempic, was initially given FDA approval in December 2017 as an anti-diabetic medication.

Tirzepatide, meanwhile, is a glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (aka gastric inhibitory polypeptide or gastric inhibitory peptide, abbreviated as GIP) which stimulates insulin secretion and also acts as a weak inhibitor of gastric acid secretion.

Tirzepatide gained FDA approval in May 2022 as an anti-diabetic drug.

So … are these drugs all they’re cracked up to be?

The Reality Check

The first thing anyone contemplating these drugs needs to accept is that the weight loss effects last only as long as you take them. In one of Novo Nordisk's 68-week “STEP” trials, overweight and obese non-diabetic adults were all given a weekly injection of 2.4 mg semaglutide for the first 20 weeks. During this 20-week period, mean body weight declined by 10.6%.

At 20 weeks, the group was then split in two. One group kept receiving Ozempic, while the other was switched to placebo. From this point to week 68, the group that continued semaglutide group lost a further −7.9% of body weight, while the group that switched to placebo gained back +6.9%.

Another of the company’s trials found that after one year off the drug, patients regained two-thirds of the weight they had lost. Favourable changes in blood pressure and HbA1c had also completely reversed at 120 weeks. After regaining most of the lost weight, the semaglutide group experienced a net 5.6% weight loss at week 120 - a questionable achievement in light of the drug's very high cost and potential toxicity.

So, for an obese person hoping to get to a normal weight and stay there, these drugs are a lifelong commitment. Unfortunately, they're proving to be very questionable suitors for a long-term relationship.

Gut-Wrenching Side Effects

Clinical trials reliably show a high incidence of nausea and gastrointestinal side effects, with similar frequencies noted for semaglutide and tirzepatide. According to the package insert for Ozempic, "The most common adverse reactions, reported in ≥5% of patients treated with OZEMPIC® are: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation."

But who reads the package insert, right? To listen to the drug companies and the researchers on their payrolls, drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are well-tolerated. Side effects are generally "mild-to-moderate" and "transient", they claim.

Sound familiar?

In Novo Nordisk's STEP-5 trial, the following event rates were observed at two years (expressed as % of participants):

Despite an allegedly higher rate of "cardiovascular disorders" in the placebo group and Novo Nordisk's attempts to position semaglutide as a heart-healthy drug, the only recorded death in the study was a semaglutide subject who suffered a fatal heart attack. He was a previous smoker with a medical history of hypertension and obstructive sleep apnea, so his death may or may not have been related to the drug.

It’s worth remembering the above figures are from a drug company-sponsored trial - the kind that tends to be heavily sanitized prior to publication. There is every likelihood the real-world incidence of side effects from this new class of drugs is even higher than what is being reported by their manufacturers.

So just what is being observed out there in the real world?

Intended as lifelong drugs, semaglutide has been on the market for less than six years, and tirzepatide for a mere 18 months, so doctors and users are learning in real time about the effects of long-term use.

“Some people get very sick, and others have no side effects at all,” said Robert F. Kushner, a professor of medicine and medical education at Northwestern University who helped conduct the pivotal STEP trials of semaglutide, paid for by Novo Nordisk.

Tia Koch, 40, a schoolteacher in Reading, Pennsylvania, was on the lowest dose of Wegovy before increasing it after a month. The next day, nausea hit her in waves. Co-workers gave her ginger ale and a motion-sickness pill, but she threw up and retreated to a classroom closet where she keeled over in pain. That night, the symptoms were so bad Koch checked into a hospital, where she suffered nausea and an elevated heart rate for several days.

Days after leaving hospital, Koch’s chest and throat still felt sore from the vomiting. She has stopped taking Wegovy and plans to cut food portions in half.

“We want instant results, and this seemed like a miracle drug,” Koch said.

Courtney Blair, 40, a business systems analyst in Vancouver, Canada, does not have diabetes and took Ozempic to lose weight. She started on the lowest dose, 0.25 milligrams, in February and took Pepto-Bismol or Pepcid tablets for occasional nausea. By mid-April, her doctor had upped her dose to 0.5 milligrams.

“My body violently rejected it,” said Blair. Stomach pain hit Blair so hard she could see her skin rippling from the intense cramps. “I was projectile vomiting and other gross things,” she said.

Barely able to get out of bed, Blair missed three days of work. She stopped Ozempic for a week but had the same reaction after restarting it.

Her doctor switched her to Saxenda, a daily-injection drug known as liraglutide approved by the FDA for managing obesity. The drug causes “only occasional” nausea and slight headaches, she said.

Refusing to give up on these drugs despite persistent side effects is a recurring theme.

Robin Demoy, a 52 year-old New Hampshire travel agent, turned to Wegovy after years of fad diets and even bariatric surgery. The once-a-week injection helped her shed more than 60 pounds.

But then she got up one morning and was so dizzy it felt like she had motion sickness. Her legs turned weak and she was nauseous. She vomited and had little desire to eat for weeks.

Not wanting to stop Wegovy, she tried staving off nausea by drinking electrolytes and eating more protein. Finally, her doctor lowered her weekly dose and her symptoms eased - but did not disappear.

Demoy plans to stay on Wegovy despite her bouts of lethargy and nausea. “I’m staying on this the rest of my life,” Demoy said. “I’m doing this because it’s right for my health.”

Influencers Under the Influence

Social media 'influencer' Claudia Oshry — who penned a New York Times bestseller Girl With No Job: The Crazy Beautiful Life of an Instagram Thirst Monster - recently shared that she was taking Ozempic for weight loss. When people began asking her if she was taking one of the diabetes drugs for weight loss, her answer was "obviously. Yes, of course."

"You thought they were going to make a weight-loss drug and I wasn't going to take it?" she said. "You're dumb. Of course, I'm f—ing taking it."

And Oshry raved about it in spite of the side effects. When she was asked if Ozempic caused her to “shed [hair] like crazy,” Oshry shared that it did, at first, “and I panicked. My hair is my life! My security blanket!”

However, she said, “I acted quick and have really gotten it under control.”

By using more drugs.

Oshry has been using the blood pressure-turned-hair-growth-medication Minoxidil to maintain her hair. She's also using "prenatal vitamins", biotin, a vegan hair growth serum that costs at least US $49 per month, and a hair growth supplement called Nutrafol that costs US $79 per month.

Lawsuit Filed

Not everyone, however, is okay with suffering sometimes debilitating side effects in order to weigh less. In what will probably be the first of many, a lawsuit has been filed in the US against Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk by a 44 year-old woman who used Ozempic and Mounjaro to reportedly lose 150 pounds. The weight loss came at a hefty cost, with multiple emergency ward visits resulting from gastroparesis, a disorder that slows or even stops the movement of food from your stomach to your small intestine.

ABC News medical contributor Dr Darien Sutton describes the condition as "absolutely brutal", with patients presenting to emergency wards with severe dehydration, electrolyte abnormalities and volatile symptoms that require hospitalization.

The woman’s law firm, Morgan and Morgan, says it has been retained by more than 500 clients in 45 states with similar stories.

Reports of Suicidal and Self-Harm Thoughts

In July, the European Medicines Agency's safety committee announced it was reviewing data on the risk of suicidal thoughts and thoughts of self-harm with drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Saxenda (liraglutide).

The review was triggered by the Icelandic medicines agency following reports of suicidal thoughts and self-injury in people using liraglutide and semaglutide. At the time of the announcement, authorities had retrieved and were analysing around 150 reports of possible cases of self-injury and suicidal thoughts.

The Cancer Risk

To top it all off, the Ozempic package insert contains a black box warning (the FDA’s highest safety warning) for the possible development of medullary thyroid cancer and multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2 (MEN-2).

The drug has been shown to cause thyroid cancer in rodent studies, and there are signs it could be doing the same in humans.

In 2020, researchers reported on a 72-week double-blind trial of semaglutide in patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, an aggressive form of fatty liver disease. Malignant neoplasms (cancerous growths) were reported in 3 patients who received semaglutide (1%) and in zero patients who received placebo. Overall, neoplasms (benign, malignant, or unspecified) were reported in 15% of the patients in the semaglutide groups and in 8% in the placebo group; no pattern of occurrence in specific organs was observed.

An analysis of the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database, published in October 2022, found no overall increase in reported cancer events, but detected significantly increased reporting ratios between GLP-1RA drugs and certain tumors, including thyroid cancers (medullary thyroid cancer and papillary thyroid cancer) and malignant pancreatic neoplasms.

A 2021 safety review of semaglutide noted in Novo Nordisk's SUSTAIN trials, three adjudicated events of malignant thyroid neoplasm were identified, two in semaglutide-treated patients, and one in the comparator group. In the company's PIONEER trial program, four thyroid malignancies occurred in semaglutide-treated patients, versus one in the comparator group.

A case-control study using the French national health care insurance system database analysed individuals with type 2 diabetes treated with second-line anti-diabetes drugs between 2006 and 2018. Thyroid cancers were identified through hospital discharge diagnoses and medical procedures between 2014 and 2018.

A total of 2,562 case subjects with thyroid cancers were included in the study and matched with 45,184 control subjects. Use of GLP-1 RA for 1–3 years was associated with increased risk of all thyroid cancer (adjusted hazard ratio 1.58) and medullary thyroid cancer (adjusted HR 1.78). While epidemiological research of this type has notable limitations, the results do tend to support the adverse event report data and clinical research findings.

In April of this year, the EMA raised a safety signal on thyroid cancer and GLP-1RA drugs (semaglutide, dulaglutide, exenatide, insulin degludec, liraglutide, lixisenatide, insulin glargine and lixisenatide), requesting further information from manufacturers.

My Thoughts

I have a conservative attitude towards drugs, and believe the use of novel, powerful drugs with high side effect rates should only ever be a last resort option.

Instead, relentless pimping on TikTok and Instagram has seen drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide become the first port of call for people who can’t or won’t implement the long-term dietary and lifestyle changes necessary to attain a healthy weight.

We live in an instant gratification culture where people happily embrace toxic drugs as the answer to life’s problems.

Feeling depressed or anxious? Here, take a pill to cure your “chemical imbalance”, even though no such imbalance has ever been documented despite decades of blaming increasing unhappiness, discontent, anxiety and loneliness on “brain chemistry” instead of the increasingly dysfunctional society and culture we now live in.

Witness the absolutely stunning charade of the last few years, where globalists, the sleazy politicians they control, and software magnates with a predilection for consorting with known sex offenders declared a pandemic based on an alleged new virus that has never been isolated by anything remotely resembling sound science. They then told us the only solution was to be injected with rushed-to-market gene therapies based on technology with a 30-year track record of failure. Instead of holding up an indignant, collective middle finger to these satanic grubs, the majority of the world instead responded, “Uhkay. Gotta do the right thing, you know!”

Resorting to potentially toxic chemicals every time life throws up some kind of challenge, real or contrived, is not the right thing.

People are clearly mesmerized by the idea of “effortlessly” losing weight simply by popping pills or taking injections.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Nausea and vomiting are not "minor" symptoms to be ignored - they are a sign that something is wrong.

The cancer and suicidality/self-harm safety signals arising from these drugs tells me this is not going to end well.

As always, I remind readers I am not a doctor. I do, however, have a healthy compliment of commonsense, and that faculty tells me a drug that sabotages healthy stomach function in order to suppress your appetite, makes you feel sick and nauseous, and may cause cancer and suicidal/self-harm thoughts in some users, is a terribly poor weight loss option.