How to spot an effort to trick you into lobbying for Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s weight loss drugs

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Big Pharma is trying to trick us into lobbying for them and it’s exactly as horrific as you think.

Regular readers will know that I take a firm view on bodily autonomy, but I also take a firm view of what constitutes things like ethical, evidence-based medicine and informed consent. Finally, I take a firm view on pharmaceutical companies infiltrating and manipulating the healthcare industry, the insurance industry, and the public, and it’s this last bit that I’d like to talk about today.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly will do anything and everything to sell their new weight loss drugs, and insurance coverage is one of their primary goals. The thing standing in their way is that their drugs are expensive and may not do much good, which makes insurance companies reticent to cover them (and I will say, that the horror of these pharma companies is so great that I am siding with the insurance industry does not make me happy,) and Medicare currently has a ban on covering weight loss treatments because of the lack of efficacy and danger.

Instead of making their product safer or better and/or lowering the prices to fit into the insurance company's cost/benefit requirements, they are trying to use the government to pressure and, in some cases, force insurance companies and Medicare to comply.

To do that they need the government to be pressured. To do that, they need as many people as they can get to pressure them. To do that, they are announcing policies, legislation on a state and national level (they’ve quietly pushed this legislation through several states already,) and curiously well-funded “grassroots” campaigns.

These medications could literally bankrupt insurance companies and governments. For example, it’s estimated that for Medicare alone, these drugs could cost Medicare Part 3 $26.8 billion a year, which would mean an almost 30% increase in the Medicare budget given that the ENTIRE Medicare Part B spending in 2021 was $98 billion (with a reminder that Medicare is funded by payer premiums and US taxpayers.)

Today I thought I’d offer a quick guide to spotting an effort (grassroots campaign, article, call to action etc.) by Novo Nordisk and/or Eli Lilly to convince us to lobby for their profit interest:

It uses a phrase like “Ob*sity is a chronic, progressive, relapsing/remitting condition” This bit of absolute junk science was written and is heavily promoted by the weight loss industry, their astroturf organizations (like the Ob*sity Action Coalition and The Ob*sity Society). They are also pushing it through these lobbying efforts because, while completely devoid of scientific merit, it forms the basis for their push for insurance coverage of their drugs and the idea that their drugs must be taken for life.

It claims that lack of access to weight loss drugs is a form of weight stigma.

It claims that expanding access to weight loss drugs is a form of fighting weight stigma

It wants you to sign a petition or contact legislators to increase access to their drugs (sometimes called “ob*sity treatment” or weight management treatment.)

It uses phrases that you are used to seeing in weight-neutral health or “body positive” space but it uses words like “overw*ight” and “ob*se.” For example: Every Body deserves healthcare… learn about the impacts of ob*sity…

It uses (stigmatizing) person-first language like “people with ob*sity” or “people affected by “ob*sity”

It claims that lack of access to weight loss drugs is some kind of social justice issue (often suggesting that a marginalized group’s lack of access to their drugs is an injustice, but not mentioning that they failed to properly represent these groups in the drug trials that they funded and conducted.)

They are on a mission to co-opt conversations around weight stigma and social justice in order to sell drugs that risk higher-weight people’s lives and quality of life with no evidence for long-term success in either weight loss or improved health (which are two different things,) so we have to be shrewd in our ability to detect and point out this nonsense.

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.