Does anyone know how this demand is being tackled?
What does the supply effort look like?
Is the drug being licensed out for other manufacturers to make?
I’m guessing it could be many many years until it’s widely available unless there’s some incredibly huge effort to make enough.
Anyone here know the inside story?
Obesity from stuffing your gob with too much food is the most first-world-problem ever. There's people out there with real problems who need care, that aren't self inflicted from their own gluttony.
Eating food is not only a necessity to live, but your body is extremely loathe to ever let you reduce how much you're eating. High calorie food might be a person's only comfort. Maybe they're working long hours and caring for someone and taking time off to exercise, something objectively not fun is not something they can emotional commit to. Maybe they're disabled. Maybe they have zero control over their schedule or even their food.
Like there are so many reasons you could be overweight and a lot of them are psychological like your parents instilling a deep sense of wrong whenever you leave literally anything on your plate.
I don't think these drugs are great long term solutions, but for people who are doing the best they can with what they can, why mock them? It's like mocking someone fat who managed to walk on a trendmill at the gym. It's a start. They can't lose all the weight with just these drugs. They're not miracles. They just give people the ability to see progress for their efforts.
Taking Ozempic doesn't solve the underlying problem of why someone overeats. It just enables the behavior by allowing the individual to indulge without addressing the eating disorder itself.
What behaviour does Ozempic enable? It works by reducing desire to eat, to the extent that Walmart is trying to figure out the potential impact on junk food sales.
In Australia at least, the TGA does not recommend prescribing ozempic for weight loss(although it's just a recommendation as they can't stop doctors from prescribing whatever they want I guess).
It's a bit of an issue because all the people using it for weight loss are causing shortages of the drug for the diabetics who actually need it.
If a huge state change like that is observed in hundreds of millions of people in a 50 year time period, I guess one explanation could be that they all independently and personally decided to inflict suffering on themselves. Another explanation is something in their collective environment changed.
No hate, it's just that to me, that that your explanation is not the most likely one.
Meat is expensive and fresh and frozen vegetables aren't particularly cheap, leading some households, particularly families and lower income, to pick items like rice, potatoes, noodles etc which are cheap and can go farther. They're calorically dense but not filling so it's easy to consume a ton of calories to feel full from eating rice and butter or butter noodles.
There's also the education aspect as one might not know or be able to eyeball what 250g of cooked rice looks like and serving sizes (at least in the US) can be deceptive. Until recently, there wasn't a sticker on 20oz soft drinks that contained the nutrition facts of the whole bottle.
Also, while push ups might be free, walking and running isn't. There's a ton of places in the US with sidewalks in poor condition if there's any sidewalk at all. Pedestrian deaths are way up recently as well so walking/running on the road isn't completely safe
Sure there will be some that have problems "self inflicted from their own gluttony", but you're making this out like it's the case for everyone using Ozempic while also attributing obesity 1-to-1 with choosing to be overindulgent. You could do with a little more compassion as it's not as simple as you're trying to make it.
Exercise will only get you so far with weight loss, and it only works as long as you can keep up the exercise. In my case I lost 35 lbs running, then broke a foot and gained it back.
> Obesity from stuffing your gob with too much food is the most first-world-problem ever.
Without addressing that many people are overweight despite constantly dieting, you are absolutely right that it can be a first-world problem. Junk food is cheap, addictive and everywhere. It might be easy for you to eat well, but it's not for everybody. For many, semaglutide blocks the constant food noise, enabling them to make smarter decisions than they are normally capable of. It's obviously a huge problem, because less effective weight loss products have been on the market forever.
The reality is that you can tut-tut about how it's better to lose weight the "natural" way, but that's not how it works. Obesity comes with a lot of co-morbidities, and the heavier you are, the harder it is to break the cycle. Even if using weight loss medication was "worse" in some way than rigorous diet and exercise alone, it's not worse than just staying fat forever.
It's the dosage delivery system that's the bottleneck, and conveniently for anyone who actually wants to try using the stuff and knows how to navigate a syringe, other people can make the drug while Big Pharma tries to get its act together with the injectors.
Some legitimate cures may emerge from this process, but only stochastically.