About 3.8 million people in the United States — four times the number two years ago — are now taking the most popular weight-loss drugs, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, an industry data provider.
Some of these recipes are for diabetes. The drugs are Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy (the same drug sold under different brand names) and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound (also the same drug).
The pent-up demand is even greater because many people who want the drugs cannot find or afford them. Without insurance coverage, people have to pay out of pocket. If they get a discount coupon from Eli Lilly, people with commercial insurance pay $550 a month for Zepbound. For those who are commercially insured, a voucher from Novo Nordisk for Wegovy reduces the pharmacy bill by $500, making the cost about $1,000 a month.
And interest is expected to continue to grow.
2. Supply is limited.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly tried to respond by increasing production, but were unable to respond enough to meet demand.
Only a limited number of plants in the world are ready and available to make injectable drugs, which are more difficult to make than pills. Adding to the complexity, each company manufactures at least five dosage properties of its drug.
“These are complex sites, very technically demanding, capital-intensive work, filled with machinery that is highly specialized and often made in not-so-large companies,” Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said last month.
For Eli Lilly, which sells Zepbound for weight loss, a critical bottleneck is producing enough pens used to inject the drug.
Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wegovy, has struggled even more than Eli Lilly to make enough of its drug, although it is trying to catch up. It said it more than doubled its supply of doses for new patients in January, estimating the drug would reach pharmacies within two weeks.
This situation is unusual, said Erin Fox, an expert at the University of Utah who tracks drug shortages. Most of the shortages involve older drugs where there is little financial incentive to manufacture the drugs. “Usually if there’s a very profitable drug, we don’t see shortages,” he said.
