100+ Hospitalizations & Deaths From Fake Obesity-Fighting Drugs

United States: In a recent update, the head of the company manufacturing the diabetes and obesity-fighting drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, stated that the compounded variety of the active component present in the drugs has been linked with at least a hundred hospitalizations and ten deaths.

More about the news

According to Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, Novo Nordisk President and CEO, “Honestly, I’m quite alarmed by what we see in the U.S. now,” US News reported.

“Patients who believe that they’re getting access to a safe product, and they believe they’re getting semaglutide … I know for a fact that they are not getting semaglutide because there’s only one semaglutide, and that’s produced by Novo Nordisk, and we don’t sell that to others,” he added.

About compound drug

A compound drug is a drug prepared or filled by other pharmacies or manufacturers apart from the firms that produce standard versions of the medications. It is usually permitted to be compounded when the standard forms of the drugs are scarce.

Semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs like it have been in short supply in the last two years as millions of Americans sought the drugs for effective and robust weight loss.

Still on the shortage list, Novo Nordisk, which makes semaglutide, pointed out last week that the only short supply of Wegovy now, which is the lowest dose, is listed as now available, CNN reported.

According to Jorgensen, “We’re collaborating with the FDA, and I think they’re looking into some of the considerations they have to make because I think they’re equally concerned about the health of patients,” US News reported.

“So exactly how that will play out, I think, still remains to be seen,” he added.

Deaths and hospitalizations origin

These were retrieved from the US Food and Drug Administration’s adverse event reporting system on semaglutide.

However, the FDA says those reports in that database are still unreviewed and only stated harms, but not necessarily from the drugs.

Moreover, the agency mentioned in October that it had gotten “multiple reports of adverse events, some requiring hospitalization, that may be related to dosing errors associated with compounded injectable semaglutide products.”

The agency did not answer a query concerning the reports at the time of writing this piece.

As for the FDA, it admitted that some of the compounders might be dealing with salt forms of semaglutide, which contain different active ingredients, and there are fake maize or counterfeit forms of the Ozempic.

Semaglutide and a similar GLP-1 drug, tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound), have been on the FDA’s shortage list since 2022 as more people require these, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists.