Readit NewsNovo and Lilly spent billions making Semaglutide, Tirzepatide, and future formulations/modalities.
They are going to monetize this heavily while they have IP coverage. There is no world they will let HIMS or any compounding pharmacy of scale undercut them.
On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes. It would make you cost them $3-6k/yr more. Insurance premiums would rise for everyone if insurance was subsidizing this - no free lunch.
Fortunately, the prices are coming down. Amazon pharmacy has Wegovy in an auto-injector starting at $199 without insurance. And that’s delivered to your door in under 24 hrs in most major cities.
I highly recommend checking out the terms of trumprx.gov - not endorsing the entire government here, but it is actually working and quite cleverly written to ensure Americans are getting the lowest cost drugs in the world now. Historically, we subsidized R&D globally by allowing pharma to make most profits on Americans then have cheaper prices abroad. That is changing and hopefully that’s a net positive.
The US obesity rate is in the 40% range.
The most effective use of public funds would be to simply buy out the patent and give it out for free. It will save so much in future medical costs it's a no-brainer.
From what I can tell they are technically correct. The FDA approved method of manufacturing the peptide chain is different than the Chinese sources these compounders are sourcing from. It may not make an actual biological difference (and hefty evidence of millions of people on it show there is unlikely to be a material difference) but it’s not the same as a generic medication being approved.
This is about as Wild West as most of us have lived through for the U.S. drug market.
I don't know about that. I'm old enough to remember The Vaping Panic of 2019, where (medical and/or recreational) cannabis vape liquid was adulterated with Vitamin E acetate in industrial quantities, which caused widespread injury and death. The real cause was called out very quickly (thanks in part to investigative reporting by...WeedMaps[1]), but health departments flailed and spent months blaming it on Juul and teen e-cigarettes. The panic evaporated because right as the public health community realized what was happening, Covid broke out.
To this day, afaik no testing of vapes is required to ensure they don't contain this toxic ingredient.
[1] https://weedmaps.com/news/2019/10/why-vitamin-e-acetate-and-...
Implied but not explicitly stated in the FDA announcement: the compounders’ real crime is not paying their protection money.
That pretty much tells you how this will end, right there.
The really stupid bubbles end up getting themselves metastasized into the public retirement system, I'm just waiting for that to start any day now.
I always thought they deliberately tried to contain the genie in the bottle as long as they could
I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...
USD devalued ~10% last year, so some of the losses are already priced into the DJI. When you account for that and sprinkle in ~3% inflation, it has lost value despite being up ~11% in the last year.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p-4nFgs9fRE