What is Behind the Push for Ozempic?

The Labyrinth of the Pharmaceutical Industry

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Does anyone remember the diet drug from the nineties, Fen-Phen? It was comprised of two drugs: fenfluramine, an appetite depressant; and phentermine, an amphetamine. You are likely aware of the phenomenon of the misuse of amphetamines for weight loss purposes, but it was not the amphetamine that brought Fen-Phen down. It was the fenfluramine, the “appetite depressant,” that was shown to cause fatal hypertension and heart valve damage to one-third of patients. The drug was taken off the market in September 1997, but not until after ethically dubious testing had been undertaken on minority children in New York City, which is eerily reminiscent of the Guinea Pig Kids. From Wikipedia:

The New York Psychiatric Institute, associated with Columbia University, the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, and Mount Sinai Medical Center tested fenfluramine intravenously on more than 100 Black and Hispanic boys between the ages of 6 and 10, with delinquent older brothers, to test the theory that delinquent behavior could be predicted by serotonin levels. These studies were conducted before the drug was pulled from the market in September 1997. […] The article reports that the yearlong investigation found no misconduct by New York State Psychiatric Institute for these tests. This article reports the number of children involved in the study as 150, and states that none were harmed.

There is also a very interesting article from The New York Times by Gina Kolata, whose name probably sounds familiar to some of you, called How Fen-Phen, A Diet 'Miracle,' Rose and Fell. I will share just a few excerpts from this piece, because they are relevant (emphasis mine):

The story started more than two decades ago when fenfluramine and phentermine were approved for short-term use as diet aids. They never gained much of a market because they were not very effective. But in 1979, Dr. Michael Weintraub, a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Rochester who has since moved to the F.D.A. to head one of its divisions of new drug approval, got the idea of trying them in combination.

Not very effective on their own, but Weintraub “got the idea of trying them in combination”? When one toxic drug doesn’t work, just throw another toxic drug on top of it, that should work.

Eventually, Dr. Weintraub put his hypothesis to the test with a four year study of 121 obese patients, two-thirds of whom were women. Their average weight at the start was 200 pounds. During the study, the patients alternately took fen-phen or dummy pills. When they took dummy pills they got hungry and gained weight, but when they took fen-phen their hunger diminished and their weight went down. At the end of the study, the patients had lost an average of 30 pounds. Dr. Weintraub looked for side effects, but he assumed the drugs were safe.

One hundred and twenty one patients. Talk about an underpowered study.

Word of fen-phen spread and patients began calling doctors to demand the drugs. Although the drugs were never approved to be taken in combination for long periods of time, doctors are free to prescribe licensed drugs in whatever way they see fit.

Some, like Dr. Dennis Tison, a Sacramento psychiatrist, devoted his entire practice to fen-phen, buying the drugs wholesale and dispensing them in his office to thousands of patients. Like many doctors, he advertised on the Internet that he prescribed fen-phen. ''I got calls from all over the country,'' Dr. Tison said. ''People would say, 'I want the meds and I will pay anything.' ''

Why is it that there is an almost perfect correlation between patients clamoring for prescription drugs and said drugs being so wildly toxic that they often get discontinued? (AZT, the Covid vaccines, Paxlovid, anyone?)

Finally, Phen-Fen was removed from the market in 1997 amid reports of heart valve damage, and, worryingly, unreported cases of pulmonary hypertension—per Wikipedia, only 4 cases were reported on the packaging of the medication, but 41 cases were known to have occurred. However, although fenfluramine is considered to have no medical use, phentermine is still prescribed, either alone or in combination with topiramate, an anti-epileptic that is also used to prevent migraines. I imagine that at this point, phentermine is the least of our worries.

Enter Ozempic.

You would think from the press surrounding Ozempic that it is this wildly innovative, never before seen medication that works in an entirely new, miraculous way, if you watch the ads or listen to the news reports. Now, I don’t even own a television, haven’t for years, but even I have seen the advertisements for Ozempic because they are impossible to miss. This campaign is possibly even more aggressive than the campaign for PrEP, and when I watched the following interview, I began to understand why. I learned that the target market for Ozempic—which is meant to be taken for a lifetime—is 50% of the U.S. population, or everyone that has clinical “pre-diabetes.” (We’ve gotten into such a Stockholm syndrome that we think nothing of hopping onto toxic pharmaceuticals before even getting a diagnosis or anything real, just the possibility that it might happen in the future.)

Here is the interview between Tucker Carlson, who’s really getting around these days, and Calley Means, who used to work for both the pharmaceutical industry and Coca-Cola. I won’t break down this interview segment by segment, but will summarize what I think are the most important points below.

The interview starts out discussing how, within the past generation, American society has become drastically more obese and more depressed. 50% of Americans have “pre-diabetes” (whatever that is), including 33% of adolescents. There is discussion of the poor nutritional advice we are being given by agencies like the FDA. One thing Mr. Means points out that the FDA subsidizes the soda industry via the food stamp industry. Why are we pushing an injectable drug that has to be taken for life to solve a problem that is systemic in nature?

At one point, Mr. Means points out that “Obesity is not an Ozempic deficiency,” and that “This drug medically is an absolute disaster.” Despite being manufactured by Novo Nordisk, a Danish company, Ozempic is barely used in Europe and is almost entirely being marketed to our “broken U.S. system.” Incredibly, a probe is even being launched in Europe into the effects of Ozempic on mental health, because there have been increased reports of depression and suicidal ideation while taking this drug, which might not be a surprise when we recall that 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut—remember the gut-brain connection?

It gets worse, when we understand how Ozempic actually works. According to drugs.com, “Ozempic helps with weight loss by slowing down how fast food travels through your digestive tract (called gastric emptying).” Translation: Ozempic causes stomach paralysis; alarmingly, this seems to persist even after patients have discontinued the drug, which apparently happens after only three months on average. This doesn’t sound dangerous at all.

It’s interesting to listen to this conversation because there are a few items that indicate just how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is. I’ll touch on a few of them here.

One thing that should have shocked me but didn’t was to find out that the NAACP is a registered lobbyist for Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic, and they claim that it is discriminatory not to support government funding for Ozempic (sounds like the attitude toward PrEP). I want to know what is behind Big Pharma’s all consuming obsession with targeting Black Americans for a lifetime of “retention in care.”

There is then a discussion of the phenomenon of medical doctors being given kick backs from drug companies, which Tucker acts shocked by. How did he not know this?

Mr. Means points out that we, societally, are fat, sick, and depressed, and that the Covid response was disastrous because we ignored the comorbidities that were the true causes of “Covid deaths.” And we continue to do it, ignoring root causes of illness, in favor of slapping a toxic band-aid on our problems. We need to return to a holistic approach to healthy because what we are doing is clearly not working.

There are only a couple of other points I’d like to address, and one is the fact that the trial on adolescents for Ozempic, endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, ran for only 68 weeks for a drug that is meant to be taken forever.

Another is the connection between metabolic disorders and dementia—again, we come to the gut-brain connection.

The last point I want to make is that the pharmaceutical approach to health is clearly not working. As Mr. Means points out, if you look at the stock market and at the loans being written to establish new obesity or cardiology centers, they are assuming that obesity is going to increase—in other words, as Ozempic is prescribed more, obesity is expected to go up. This is INSANITY.

They touch on statins as well, and I won’t get into that today, but it’s interesting—I know people that have taken them and have had horrible reactions.

The message is clear: “Throw will power out the window. This is a brain disease, it doesn’t matter what you eat.” Tucker replies with: “Isn’t that what they said twenty years ago about pain?” As we know, the opioid crisis eventuated thanks to that attitude.

I don’t know a lot about this next piece of information, but I’m going to put it out here because it’s interesting and I’d like to bookmark this for the future. “The highest indicator that you can have for dementia is some kind of blood sugar dysregulation. If you have normal fasting glucose levels, your chance of dementia is very low.” This seems like an area with significant potential for actual improvement in health outcomes.

The penultimate item I’d like to pay attention to is that Mr. Means points out that healthcare is the largest growing industry in our country and that as it grows, we get sicker. This certainly seems to be true. We’re throwing PrEP at HIV-negative individuals, in some cases without a prescription; we’re developing useless vaccines at warp speed; we’re taking addictive medications for pain; and we’re paralyzing our stomachs to lose weight and manipulate our laboratory results so we appear to be healthy, all the while these medications silently (or not so silently, sometimes) destroy our bodies and brains. No wonder we have a massive mental health crisis—when we’re sick, we’re necessarily less happy than when we are well, for one thing. It’s a labyrinth that will take some time to get out of, but get out of it we must, or the future of our health as Americans is at serious risk.

Clearly, Ozempic is dangerous. Mr. Means drops the following bombshell (paraphrased): “News ad spending from pharma is a public relations lobbying tactic to buy off the media.” In other words, those advertisements are not aimed at the consumer at all, but are rather a sinister tactic to keep the mainstream media in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies and their interests. The implications of this are ominous indeed, especially when we consider that most countries don’t even allow the types of TV ads for pharmaceutical products that the U.S. does. Whatever is going on between government and Pharma behind the scenes, it is clear that it is not limited to AIDS, but let’s not forget that the response to AIDS was a big puzzle piece in the unfolding story of fast-tracked pharmaceuticals.

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