We’re feasting on weight loss drugs. Should we rely on artificial means to keep us healthy? This is a media story wrapped in a gelatinous capsule and taken orally.
+++
The science that makes weight-loss drugs work is glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist. Or, GLP-1 for short. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first GLP-1 way back in 2005 for a drug called Byetta. Ozempic got approved in 2017 using an updated GLP-1 known in doctor circles as semaglutide.
You may know that Ozempic is a big deal. Globally, people bought $14B of the wonder drug last year. It’s on pace to double that figure this year. It’s so in demand it’s getting hard to get.
Now, I’m not a doctor, so I’ll just take its approval, sales, and scarcity as a sign that GLP-1s help people. Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier is a doctor. A real doctor. The Dean of Harvard’s Medical School. He says GLP-1s could have been helping people much sooner.
Wayer back in 1987, he co-founded a startup called MetaBio. MetaBio obtained the world-wide rights to GLP-1s for weight loss. The company collaborated with Pfizer. Together, they showed it lowered blood glucose in diabetic subjects, slowed gastric emptying, and reduced hunger. Home meet run.
Pfizer terminated the partnership in 1990. Because they believed there would never be another injectable therapy for diabetes besides insulin. Oops.
Dr. Flier wrote a wonderful soliloquy to end his 13-page open access paper in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
He talks about the little company that could. He notes that MetaBio went down because there were mistaken ideas about what was possible. And he highlights the roles: corporate structure, luck, and the wants of ambitious people play.
When I read it, I sent it to a friend who’s living this story right now. He has a promising drug that could help people with ALS. Better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Big doctors are on board. The data looks solid. For some reason big pharma just doesn’t want to partner with his little company that maybe can.
His lengthy text was, “It’s interesting to think about how many good drugs were abandoned along the way. Some to be revived and some not. In the meantime, lots of people didn’t get the benefit of their drug, many may have died prematurely for the lack of it.”
He went on to make this important comment, “My gut instinct after reading the article is that someone (maybe several someone’s) was touting how great their oral diabetes drugs were, which made Pfizer abandon an injectable. Of course the oral drugs must not have lived up to the hype, hence the value of injectable’s.” Oh, and this, “In a nutshell, ‘hype kills.’”
Being oblivious to agenda-driven strategy, I asked if this is a new thing. He sent me a laughing emoji and this story.
A few years back, I went to Sweden and saw the country’s most-visited tourist attraction. A ship called the Vasa. Built in the early 1600s, it was designed to be the most powerful warship of its day. King Gustavus Adolphus, wanting to see his prize sail, urged for it to be launched. Even though it hadn’t been tested and seemed unstable, no one pushed back. The ship did. The Vasa sailed 1400 yards and sank. The Swedes investigated the matter for fault. They found none.
“Folks at the top,” he said, “have always gotten what they want. No one ever pushes back. And, there’s never any fault or fallout.”
Had ideas not be supressed, maybe we would have had weight-loss and diabetes drugs a two decades earlier. Maybe 200,000 people who suffer with ALS would have a possible treatment. Those ships sailed. And sank.
Which, finally, brings us our present-day story.
The other day, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan. In it, he explained that in 2021, the Biden Administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta’s teams to censor certain information about COVID and “expressed a lot of frustration” when Meta didn’t comply.
So, Zuckerberg did what very senior people told him to do. He had Meta censor stuff. It’s no big deal. Clearly, it’s been happening for hundreds of years.
Biden was President in 2021 during COVID. Adolphus was King when he pushed to see his boat sail. Pfizer held the keys to MetaBio purse strings. You’re welcome to argue among yourselves if they wielded power rightly.
But there was, perhaps, something more worrying in Zuckerberg’s letter. In 2020, the FBI “in a separate situation” warned Meta that stories about the Biden Family and Burisma were Russian disinformation. Meta saw the stories and demoted them. The FBI aren’t elected presidents and they aren’t kings. They don’t hold the keys to any castle. Zuckerberg didn’t say they urged or pressured Meta to do anything. Meta just did exactly what they wanted.
Don’t worry, though. Meta has changed their policies and won’t do that again. They will “push back” if something like this happens again.
You know, I wonder… maybe my esteemed friend got it wrong. Maybe it’s not hype that kills. Maybe it’s the absence of hype that kills.
Tomorrow is the Post-Mortem.