World Health Organization makes sensational U-turn on Ozempic amid growing concerns about side effects

The World Health Organization is gearing up to officially endorse weight-loss drugs to tackle obesity in adults for the first time.

The U-turn was revealed in a leaked memo seen by Reuters, after the agency previously said it could not recommend the drugs because there was not enough data on their long-term effects.

The recommendation, which could also see the drugs added to their essential medicines list, may make the drugs more widely available globally.

With more than two in five US adults battling obesity and over a billion people worldwide grappling with the condition, the WHO is calling for urgent action.

But obesity drugs — also called glucagon-like peptide-1s — are not without risks, and have also been linked to a string of concerning side effects.

Estimates also suggest they may have hospitalized about 70 Americans every day last year after becoming wildly popular for their promise of triggering weight loss with little more than a weekly injection.

The agency is also demanding action to make the drugs available in low- and middle-income countries, where there is also an obesity epidemic.

But it raises concerns about the costs, at more than $1,000 per month, which officials said made them inaccessible to many.

The above map shows the obesity rate by state in the US in 2024. The estimates are from the CDC

The WHO’s conditional recommendation will be officially released in August as part of new guidelines on treating obesity. It is also working on separate guidelines for children and adolescents.

Separately, WHO experts will also meet next week to decide whether to include the weight loss drugs in the agency’s essential medicines list – both to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes.

The WHO’s essential medicines list is a catalogue of the drugs that should be available in all functioning health systems.

The list includes 635 medicines, which also already includes insulin for treating diabetes and metformin, which can help the body use its own insulin.

The list can help make drugs more widely available, as experts say happened in 2002 when HIV drugs were included.

In 2023, the experts decided against adding obesity drugs to the list, with WHO saying more evidence was needed on their long-term clinical benefit.

However, in the new memo recommending their use as a treatment, the agency says it supports including them on the list this time round.

Still, the WHO also raises concerns over the cost of the drugs and calls for longer-term studies on cost-effectiveness ‘across all settings, including LMICs’ (low- and middle-income countries).

‘The same mechanisms that are used in large-scale medicine access programmes may need to be adopted,’ to improve access, the WHO adds, such as tiered pricing or pooled procurement.

But it also notes that the active ingredient in one of the newer drugs, semaglutide — used in Novo’s Wegovy — comes off patent in some markets next year.

Several companies are planning to launch cheaper generic versions of the drugs then. 

Liraglutide, the active ingredient in the older generation of drugs, is already available as a lower-cost generic drug, with products approved in the U.S. and Europe, the memo adds.

Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, and Eli Lilly, which makes Mounjaro and Zepbound, did not immediately comment on the news.