exclusive
The president of the Obesity Society is campaigning for weight loss injections to be paid for by health insurance companies. According to AOK calculations, this could cost billions. Now doctors are also warning against the hype.
When Jens Aberle, President of the Obesity Society, spoke about the new weight loss injection at a press conference in February of this year, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. The injection is a “game changer,” and there have never been medications “that were even close to the effectiveness we are experiencing now,” said Aberle. There are always side effects, but they are “relatively manageable”.
Dozens of media outlets across Germany picked up the keywords and adopted the formulation: the weight loss injection – a “game changer”. The press conference was organized by the Science Media Center (SMC).
“No explicit ones Conflicts of interest specified”
What the journalists there were not told, however, was that Aberle received money from the syringe company Novo Nordisk. The other experts at the press conference stated conflicts of interest – but none at Aberle. SMC managing director Volker Stollorz confirmed that the organizers had asked Aberle in advance about the money he received from pharmaceutical companies, but “Mr. Aberle did not expressly declare any conflicts of interest to us.”
In fact, according to research by NDR, WDR and “Süddeutscher Zeitung” received money from the pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca – sometimes for lectures, sometimes for advice. Aberle, who works full-time as a doctor at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, explains when asked that he is asked very often “in all this hype” about the weight loss injection. “It may be that here and there this is not stated, but that was a one-off omission.”
The hype was fueled by the new weight loss injection in the USA. Billionaire Elon Musk publicly admitted that he had lost a few pounds thanks to the injection. And when host Jimmy Kimmel opened the Oscars in March, he said: “Everyone looks great here. When I look around I ask myself: Is Ozempic right for me?”
preparations are prescription only
Ozempic contains the same active ingredient as Wegovy, but is only approved for diabetics in Germany and is only paid for by statutory health insurance companies for this use. Both preparations require a prescription.
Because Wegovy, which is only approved as a weight loss preparation and is not covered by insurance, is around twice as expensive per milligram of active ingredient as Ozempic, many overweight people in Germany also want the cheaper Ozempic in order to lose weight. The result is an enormous supply shortage: Diabetics currently often have to go to several pharmacies to get their usual medication.
Andreas Klinge, a diabetologist in Hamburg and board member of the German Medical Association’s Drug Commission, says that not a day goes by without at least four or five patients requesting the weight-loss injection. He has never experienced such hype about a drug in twenty years of practicing medicine.
More valuable than VW, BMW and Mercedes combined
The manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy, the Danish company Novo Nordisk, is benefiting from global demand. The stock market price has risen by 70 percent in the past year alone. Novo Nordisk is now the most valuable company in all of Europe with a market value of 315 billion euros – more valuable than VW, BMW and Mercedes combined.
And the good thing for Novo Nordisk from a business perspective is that patients will probably have to take the injection for the rest of their lives. The company itself submitted a corresponding study for approval: 900 patients received the Wegovy weight loss injection for 20 weeks.
The group was then randomly divided into two groups. One group continued to receive the weight loss preparation, the other, without knowing it, received an injection without the active ingredient. The result: The Wegoyv group lost weight by an additional eight percent on average, while the placebo group gained weight by an average of seven percent.
Do you have to take Wegovy forever?
“According to all the data we have, you have to take Wegovy forever,” says Andreas Klinge from the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association. “When you stop the injection, people regain the weight they previously lost.”
Doctors like Klinge, who have not accepted any money from the pharmaceutical industry for years, view the new weight-loss injection more critically than Aberle, for example. Wegovy is “significantly better than all the medications we have previously had for weight loss,” says Klinge. But there are also common side effects.
Many patients who take them have suffered from nausea, diarrhea or even vomiting. There is also evidence of pancreatic inflammation and rare thyroid tumors in animal experiments.
In March, Aberle published a large article about the syringe under his name in “Bild am Sonntag”. In it he demands that health insurance companies cover the treatment costs. According to social law, they are currently neither allowed to pay for potency pills nor weight loss medications. Aberle writes in “Bild am Sonntag” (Axel-Springer-Verlag): “The coverage of costs is important because many of those affected cannot afford long-term therapy with the new means.”
There is no mention of Aberle’s conflicts of interest here either. Manja Dannenberg, board member of the doctors’ initiative MEZIS (abbreviation for “My Food, Pay for Myself”), criticized in an interview with panoramathat not only Aberle himself, but also his obesity society are financially dependent on Novo Nordisk.
145,000 euros from Novo Nordisk in 2022 alone
According to its own information, Aberles Fachgesellschaft received 145,000 euros from Novo Nordisk last year alone – compared to only 80,000 euros from membership fees. MEZIS doctor Dannenberg says: “As President of the Obesity Society, Mr. Aberle acts as an expert. And if you look at the background, you know that he himself regularly gives lectures for the manufacturing company Novo Nordisk or works as a consultant .”
When asked, Axel Springer Verlag stated that they were “not aware of the conflict of interest due to his function at Novo Nordisk”. “If we had been aware of him, we would have looked for another expert on this topic.”
People with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more are considered obese. The AOK assumes that around 19 percent of the adult population is obese. If everyone received the Wegovy injection and based on the current price of just under 4,000 euros per year per patient, the AOK would have a possible expenditure of 52.3 billion euros.
That would be more than the previous total expenditure on all medications in statutory health insurance combined. Last year these were 48.8 billion euros. When asked, Aberle himself says that it is “completely clear” that health insurance companies cannot pay for the injection for all obese people. You have to define a group that will particularly benefit from this.
In the USA, pharmaceutical companies have to publish every year which doctor they have paid and how many dollars. President Barack Obama’s administration introduced this transparency in 2010 in the so-called “Sunshine Act.”
Information voluntary in Europe
In Europe, such information is voluntary. Some members of the board of the Obesity Society still comply. For example, we learn that another board member of the company received 39,000 euros from Novo Nordisk last year.
You won’t find Jens Aberle’s name on these transparency lists. He has not allowed Novo Nordisk, Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca or Eli Lilly to publish the payments made to him in recent years. Aberle says it was only “insignificant sums”, “significantly less” than his colleague on the board of the Obesity Society. Not publishing the payments is a personal decision.
You can see more about this and other topics on Panorama at 9:45 p.m. on the first.