The much-anticipated launch of Blue Shield of California’s drug benefit venture with Amazon Pharmacy and the pharmacy benefit manager Abarca will debut in January, executives involved say.
Across the U.S., at least 7,000 pharmacies have closed since 2019, The Associated Press reported, citing data from the University of Pittsburgh. Of those, roughly half were independent drugstores.
The availability of safe, effective COVID vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases. Now, after backlash against public health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump's nominating antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the nation's top health official, health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, meningitis, or even polio.
In the first head-to-head test, Eli Lilly's Zepbound obesity drug helped people lose significantly more weight than its main competitor, Novo Nordisk's Wegovy.
The details
People taking Zepbound lost 20.2% of their body weight on average after 72 weeks of treatment in the Lilly-sponsored study, compared with a 13.7% loss for Wegovy patients, Lilly said Wednesday.
That translated into an average 50-pound loss for people who took Zepbound, while Wegovy users lost 33 pounds.
The significance
Lilly's new study is the first randomized clinical trial to demonstrate that Zepbound could induce more weight loss than Wegovy in head-to-head testing.
Previous studies sponsored by Lilly and Novo Nordisk found that each of the drugs helped people who are obese lose significant amounts of weight, but those trials didn't compare Zepbound and Wegovy against each other.
Lilly will probably cite the results from its new study in the company's Zepbound marketing. It could give Lilly an edge with doctors and patients in one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative prescription-drug markets.
Novo Nordisk responded by saying Wegovy is the only anti-obesity medicine proven to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes in people with heart disease and obesity.
A highly anticipated obesity-drug candidate from biotech Amgen helped patients shed a significant amount of weight in a midstage study. Subjects taking Amgen's MariTide lost 20% of their body weight compared with those who received placebos, Amgen said Tuesday. Analysts had generally expected the drug to achieve weight reduction of 20% or more. The drug's most common side effects included nausea and vomiting. The news sent Amgen shares gyrating in premarket trading, falling as much as 10%, as investors parsed the company's announcement and awaited more details from a company conference call. Some analysts say the obesity-drug market, now dominated by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk's GLP-1 drugs, could eventually reach more than $100 billion in annual sales worldwide, with Amgen taking as much as 10% to 15% of the pie.
In clinical trials, most participants taking Wegovy or Mounjaro to treat obesity lost an average of 15% to 22% of their body weight — up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But roughly 10% to 15% of patients in those trials were "nonresponders" who lost less than 5% of their body weight. Now that millions of people have used the drugs, several obesity experts told The Associated Press that perhaps 20% of patients — as many as 1 in 5 — may not respond well to the medications. It's a little-known consequence of the obesity drug boom, according to doctors who caution eager patients not to expect one-size-fits-all results.