In his new career as a Daily Mail columnist Boris Johnson has a fraction of the responsibility placed upon his shoulders as prime minister during the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, in his very first column for the paper he managed to recommend a ‘wonder drug’ appetite suppressant without warning his readers that it is being investigated by the European Union and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for association with suicidal thoughts.
Johnson’s column, published on 17 June, recalled how Boris had been surprised by sudden weight loss in three of his former cabinet colleagues. The answer, he discovered from one of them, was a drug called semaglutide, marketed under the proprietary name Ozempic. The former PM says he then visited a doctor who gave him a prescription for the drug, injecting it into his abdomen once a week in the hope that it would stop his midnight raids of the fridge for cheese and chorizo.
Initially, he wrote, the drug helped him lose four or five pounds a week – at the cost, that is, of making him feel ill.
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