Health Secretary Wes Streeting has dismissed suggestions that plans to provide weight loss jabs to unemployed people with obesity are “dystopian”.
The UK government is partnering with pharmaceutical giant Lilly who are running a five-year trial in Greater Manchester to test if the weight-loss drug Mounjaro can help get more people back to work and prevent obesity-related diseases to ease the strain on the NHS in England.
The announcement prompted a backlash, with accusations that the government was stigmatising unemployed individuals and reducing people to their economic value.
Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Streeting said the jabs were part of a broader healthcare plan, adding that he was “not interested in some dystopian future where I involuntarily jab unemployed people who are overweight”.
The drug works mostly by them no longer wanting to eat it.
This isn’t a way to lose weight without changing diet, it’s a way to change diet.
Sure, appetite drops a bit in that specific person, but this still doesn’t do anything to motivate the big food industry to change its ways - they can assume that specific person will still eat their products, and can carry on selling ultra-processed food to everyone else