Diabetes drug Ozempic takes China by storm, touted as miracle weight loss drug
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Hong Kong: A medication meant for treating diabetes, is now in high demand worldwide with celebrities and social media users touting it as a miracle drug for weight loss despite concerns from medical experts.
The frenzy surrounding Ozempic, as the drug is known, has swept China by storm where being "wafer thin" is a prevailing beauty standard. The high demand has reportedly led to shortages in the country.
Ozempic was officially approved in China in April 2021 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.
Chinese social media apps, such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, have been flooded by posts from users bragging about how they've easily lost 10 or more pounds within a month with just a few injections of Ozempic, which is the brand name of semaglutide, CNN reported.
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"This is a wonder drug," according to a popular series of posts on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social app similar to Instagram. "No diet, no exercise, you can reduce weight even when you are lying still."
Users can get it from doctors for other uses, or buy it on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com with other people's prescriptions, CNN reported.
However, medical experts say the drug can have serious side effects. Studies and patient reports show that many patients see their weight rebound soon after stopping the injection.
But its soaring popularity in China means many hospitals and drugstores have run out of Ozempic since late last year, according to the state-owned People's Daily Health. That has caused problems for patients with diabetes who depend on the medication.
A doctor at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in the megacity of Guangzhou told official media last month that the hospital briefly ran out of Ozempic because of surging demand from patients seeking to lose weight.
The hospital has since stopped prescribing it to people who don't have diabetes, CNN reported.
The social media hype was so enormous that Xiaohongshu launched a crackdown in February and deleted more than 5,000 posts sharing weight loss experiences with Ozempic.
The social media platform accused many posts of “exaggerating” the drug’s effectiveness as a weight loss aide and warned its users not to “blindly believe” in such content.
The platform also initiated a pop-up alert reminding users searching for the drug online to “go to formal medical facilities for treatment.”
But it wasn’t enough to calm the frenzy. Chinese women have long faced pressure to conform to beauty standards that emphasize an extremely slim figure.
With rising demand, prices have soared online. The official cost of a 1.5 mg Ozempic dose is 478 yuan ($67) in public hospitals, according to China’s National Reimbursement Drugs List.
But prices for the same medication currently range from 36% to 151% higher on online shopping site Taobao.
According to its manufacturer, Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk (NONOF), Ozempic recorded sales of 303 million Danish kroner ($44 million) in China in the nine months after it launched in April 2021.
