UK to study offering weight-loss drugs to get people off the dole

Weight-loss drugs could be given to unemployed people with obesity as a way of getting them into work, British Health Secretary Wes Streeting has suggested.
Unhealthy eating impacts people’s lives, cutting their life expectancy, he said. “Our widening waistbands are also placing significant burden on our health service,” Streeting wrote in an opinion piece for the Telegraph.
He suggested that weight-loss jabs — such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Mounjaro — could be “life-changing” for people using them. They could dent the £11 billion the country’s National Health Service spends on obesity each year — which is even more than smoking.  
“The long-term benefits of these drugs could be monumental in our approach to tackling obesity,” he wrote. For many people, these jabs could “help them get back to work, and ease the demands on our NHS.”
Streeting’s suggestion comes the same day the United Kingdom government announced a £279 million investment from Lilly — the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and the chief rival to Wegovy and Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk in the obesity drug market.
Streeting said the collaboration will include “exploring new ways of delivering health and care services to people living with obesity, and a five-year real-world study of a cutting-edge obesity treatment.”
The study in Greater Manchester, led by Lilly and Health Innovation Manchester, will look at whether using Lilly’s obesity and diabetes drugs impacts participants’ “health-related quality of life” and “changes in [their] employment status and sick days from work.”
Last year, the Observer reported that Novo Nordisk had lobbied the then-Conservative government, suggesting they could profile people who claim state benefits and target them with weight-loss jabs.
But this approach also raises ethical questions about whether some people with obesity should be offered treatment over others.
“There are some serious ethical, financial and efficacy considerations with such an approach,” said obesity specialist Dolly van Tulleken, a visiting researcher at the epidemiology unit at the University of Cambridge. “Such as looking at people — or measuring people — based on their potential economic value, rather than primarily based on their needs and their health needs,” she told the BBC on Tuesday.
Van Tulleken argued that people who are eligible should be able to receive the treatment, but warned that this must be coupled with measures to ease healthy food choices.
“You can treat people all you want, but if we’re putting them back into the conditions that made them sick in the first place, it’s incredibly important to stop that — and that very much lies with our food environment.”
Another concern is the scale of treatment needed. While the study will enroll 5,000 people with obesity, more than two-thirds of the adult population is overweight or obese.
However, the NHS has forecast that these medicines would have the greatest benefits for up to 300,000 people, James Bethell, a health minister under the former Conservative government, told the BBC Today program.
This article has been updated.