- Employer-sponsored healthcare costs keep rising, and it’s ‘sort of untenable’ Yahoo Finance
- Boom in weight-loss drugs to drive up US employers’ medical costs in 2024: consultant New York Post
- Opinion | Want Lower Obesity Drug Costs? Medicare Holds the Key Medpage Today
- ‘Let them run’: Jim Cramer says analysts who are wary of ‘revolutionary’ weight-loss drugs like Wegovy are ‘insane’ — here’s why the TV host is so bullish on this sector Yahoo Finance
- AMA urges insurance companies to cover pricey obesity treatment drugs KSTP
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Tag Archives: Healthcare
Gaza healthcare: Hospitals overwhelmed & running low on supplies – Al Jazeera English
- Gaza healthcare: Hospitals overwhelmed & running low on supplies Al Jazeera English
- Doctors Without Borders describes ‘incredibly catastrophic’ situation in Gaza, says volunteers are under constant ‘bombardment’ KATU
- Aid coming into Gaza “not nearly enough,” Doctors Without Borders director says CBS News
- People in Gaza — including children – are undergoing surgery without painkillers, says Doctors Without Borders CNN
- Gaza doctors forced to operate on patients without morphine, painkillers as supplies dwindle KATU
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Kris Jenner’s full-body preventative MRI on ‘The Kardashians’ is just the latest example of the family’s obsession with expensive (and unnecessary) healthcare treatments – Yahoo Entertainment
- Kris Jenner’s full-body preventative MRI on ‘The Kardashians’ is just the latest example of the family’s obsession with expensive (and unnecessary) healthcare treatments Yahoo Entertainment
- Kris Jenner’s full-body preventative MRI on ‘The Kardashians’ is just the latest example of the family’s obses Business Insider India
- Kris Jenner declares she will ‘never’ use the word ‘retirement’: ‘I plan on lasting a really long time’ Yahoo Entertainment
- Kris Jenner on Why ‘Retirement Is Not a Word I Will Ever Use’ — and How She Hopes to ‘Emulate’ Life of Mom MJ Yahoo Entertainment
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CVS, Walmart to Cut Pharmacy Hours as Staffing Squeeze Continues
CVS, the largest U.S. drugstore chain by revenue, plans in March to cut or shift hours at about two-thirds of its roughly 9,000 U.S. locations. Walmart plans to reduce pharmacy hours by closing at 7 p.m. instead of 9 p.m. at most of its roughly 4,600 stores by March.
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
previously said it was operating thousands of stores on reduced hours because of staffing shortages. Combined, the three chains operate some 24,000 retail pharmacies across the U.S.
Walmart last year raised pay for pharmacy technicians.
Photo:
Ryan David Brown for The Wall Street Journal
Earlier in the pandemic, CVS and Walgreens struggled to meet demand for Covid shots and vaccines. The chains cut hours and, in some cases, closed pharmacies for entire weekends. Walmart, which sells a wider variety of goods, cut overall store hours, in part, to cope with Covid-related labor shortages and make time to restock empty shelves as demand for basics such as toilet paper surged.
CVS, in a recent notice to field leaders, said most of its reduced hours will be during times when there is low patient demand or when a store has only one pharmacist on site, which the company said is a “top pain point,” for its pharmacists.
CVS said in a statement it periodically reviews pharmacy operating hours as part of the normal course of business to ensure stores are open during high-demand times. “By adjusting hours in select stores this spring, we ensure our pharmacy teams are available to serve patients when they’re most needed,” the company said, adding that customers who encounter a closed pharmacy can seek help at a nearby location.
At Walmart, the shorter hours offer pharmacy workers a better work-life balance and best serve customers in the hours they are most likely to visit the pharmacy, said a company spokeswoman. “This change is a direct result of feedback from our pharmacy associates and listening to our customers,” she said. Some Walmart pharmacies already close before 9 p.m., which will become standard across the country after the change.
An online community message board for Holliston, Mass., a small town about 30 miles outside Boston, was populated with messages last month from locals venting about the unpredictable hours of the CVS in town, said resident Audra Friend, who does digital communications for a nonprofit. Ms. Friend said she struggled for a week in November to refill a prescription for a rescue inhaler at the store because the pharmacy was sporadically closed.
“I would go in, and there was a note on the door saying, ‘Sorry, pharmacy closed,’” said Ms. Friend, who switched her prescriptions to a 24-hour CVS about 5 miles away. She said it would be better to have consistently shorter hours if that meant fewer unexpected closures. “At least that way we’re not just showing up at CVS to find out the pharmacist isn’t there,” she said.
A CVS spokeswoman said that in recent weeks the Holliston store has had no unexpected closures.
The drugstore chains have been working to stop an exodus of pharmacy staff by offering such perks as bonuses, higher pay and guaranteed lunch breaks. Pharmacists were already in short supply before the pandemic, and consumer demand for Covid-19 shots and tests put additional strains on pharmacy operations. Walgreens recently said staffing problems persist and remain a drag on revenue.
Retail pharmacies, which benefited from a bump in sales and profits during the pandemic, are now reworking their business models as demand for Covid tests and vaccines decline and generic-drug sales generate smaller profits.
CVS and Walgreens are closing hundreds of U.S. stores and launching new healthcare offerings as they try to transform themselves into providers of a range of medical services, from diagnostic testing to primary care.
This past summer, Walgreens was offering bonuses up to $75,000 to attract pharmacists, while CVS is working to develop a system in which pharmacists could perform more tasks remotely. The median annual pay for pharmacists was nearly $129,000 in 2021, according to Labor Department data, which also projected slower-than-average employment growth in the profession through 2031.
In the past year, the chains have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into recruiting more pharmacists and technicians but staffing up has proven difficult. Pharmacists remain overworked, pharmacy-chain executives have acknowledged, and fewer people are attending pharmacy schools. The number of pharmacy-school applicants has dropped by more than one-third from its peak a decade ago, according to the Pharmacy College Application Service, a centralized pharmacy-school application service.
Meanwhile, many pharmacists who aren’t quitting the field are leaving drugstores to work in hospitals or with other employers.
Walmart raised wages for U.S. pharmacy technicians in the past year, bringing average pay to more than $20 an hour. Walmart said it planned to raise the minimum wage for all U.S. hourly workers in its stores and warehouses to $14 next month, from $12.
CVS and Walgreens last year raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour.
Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com and Sarah Nassauer at Sarah.Nassauer@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Would You Sell Your Extra Kidney?
When we were teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that all the previous testing had somehow missed. My brother was pushed onto “the list,” where he’d wait, who knows how long, for the kidney of somebody who had died and possessed the generous foresight to be a donor after death. I was next in line for my dad’s kidney. We matched, and the date was set for August 28. Then my parents got a call early in the morning on August 22. There had been a car crash. A kidney was available. As with many things in life, my brother went first and I followed.
His operation went smoothly. Six days later, it was my turn. I remember visiting the doctor shortly before the transplant, feeling the pinprick and stinging flush of local anesthetic, then a blunted tugging, the nauseating and strange sensation of a dialysis catheter withdrawn from below my collarbone. I remember, later, the tranquil fog of midazolam as I was rolled to the OR.
I remember waking from great depths after surgery under bright lights and shivering violently, then falling back asleep. I remember lying naked under blankets in the ICU, mildly delirious from morphine while watching a movie about a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin fleeing a giant grizzly bear. I remember friends visiting me on the recovery floor, and how it hurt to laugh.
But now that 24 years have passed, all in relatively good health, I can recognize how much I’ve forgotten. I forget the short leash of dialysis from the months before my transplant: those oversize recliners deep inside the taupe core of a hospital building where, three times a week, machines drained and recycled my blood. I forget the plainness of a low-potassium, low-phosphorus, low-salt diet. I forget how bizarre it is that a few pills in the morning and a few at night keep the foreign organ in my lower abdomen alive—keep me alive. I, regrettably, lose sight of the supreme gift I’ve been given, this indefinite allowance of extra time, while 90,000 other Americans wait for this same gift, often on dialysis for years. Roughly 4 percent will die every year still waiting, and another 4 percent will become too sick to undergo major surgery. But here I am, forgetting this grace.
Five years ago, my brother’s kidney began to fail, and all of these buried memories resurfaced. His blood tests returned erratic levels, and nephrologists fretted. He was in and out of the hospital with recurring viral infections. A biopsy revealed necrotic tissue perforating half his kidney, webbed throughout like the tunnels of an ant colony. Finally, in May of 2018, he sent an email to family and friends, distilling the two borrowed decades during which he had attended concerts, hiked the Pacific Northwest, fallen in love, gotten married, started a family. All of these details were offered with a kind of chummy lightheartedness, but, as every reader knew, they barreled toward the inevitable and awkward conclusion. He was 37 years old and back in the hunt for a kidney. Would you be so kind as to consider … ?
The first successful kidney transplant took place in Boston in 1954 between a deliriously ill Richard Herrick and his identical twin brother, Ronald. Eight years later, his new kidney still doing its job, Richard died of a heart attack. Scattered attempts had come before then. In Ukraine, in 1933, the kidney of a 60-year-old man with type B blood who’d been dead for six hours was transplanted into a 26-year-old woman with type O blood who’d lost kidney function after poisoning herself. The recipient survived for two more days, which is miraculous considering the technology, circumstances, and general knowledge at the time. A transplant recipient in Chicago, in 1950, had some additional kidney function for a few months. Paris became a hotbed of experimentation in the early ’50s. Then came the Herricks.
Their story was technically dazzling but left unsolved the central biological puzzle of transplantation: how to tame the immune system. In most cases, our bodies recognize foreign tissue and send a battery of B and T cells to kill it. As identical twins with identical-enough tissue types, the Herricks sidestepped this problem. But doctors would need a solution to our innate immune response if kidney transplants were ever to become a mainstream procedure. Early efforts subjected patients to full-body preoperative blasts of X-ray radiation at borderline-lethal doses. The intent was to crush the immune system, then let it rebuild with the new kidney in place. This was sometimes accompanied by an injection of bone marrow. Most patients died from organ rejection, graft-versus-host disease, or both. The field of transplant surgery grew insular and desperate. Citing the fundamental precept of avoiding unnecessary harm, the more conservative medical practitioners of the day vilified the practice. Around this time, one detractor wondered, “When will our colleagues give up this game of experimenting on human beings? And when will they realize that dying, too, can be a mercy?”
Flu, RSV and COVID continue to stress healthcare system
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In a season for spreading holiday cheer, experts say we are spreading so much more.
Our healthcare system is being tested yet again; This time, three illnesses are behind it.
The flu, is striking hard – with cases nationwide more than a dozen times higher than around this time last year. There are also concerns around RSV.
And another virus we have been battling for years now.
“COVID is still the background, but it is not gone,” said Dr. Jose Cabanas.
Dr. Cabanas is Wake County’s chief medical officer; He worries all of these illnesses together could overwhelm our healthcare system – from EMS to our emergency rooms.
“When we have capacity challenges in the health care delivery system, then the priority is to ensure that the life-threatening and more acute emergencies are taken care of more rapidly,” said Cabanas.
For other medical issues, wait times could potentially grow.
Health experts said the fast spread comes as many of us relax precautions we previously took around COVID – and as we begin to gather again.
But Cabanas said there are things you can do to protect yourself.
“Get your flu shot, make sure you are being cognizant of your contacts,” said Cabanas. “Wash your hands, not touching your face. Make sure you get your covid booster shot.”
The same advice is coming from the white house.
“The most important thing you can do to prepare for your holidays is to get your updated covid vaccine,” said First Lady Jill Biden.
Another way to relieve our local health care system – go to the hospital emergency department if you are at high risk or have concerning symptoms; Other visits may be able to be handled by a primary care physician.
Flu, RSV and COVID continue to stress healthcare system
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In a season for spreading holiday cheer, experts say we are spreading so much more.
Our healthcare system is being tested yet again; This time, three illnesses are behind it.
The flu, is striking hard – with cases nationwide more than a dozen times higher than around this time last year. There are also concerns around RSV.
And another virus we have been battling for years now.
“COVID is still the background, but it is not gone,” said Dr. Jose Cabanas.
Dr. Cabanas is Wake County’s chief medical officer; He worries all of these illnesses together could overwhelm our healthcare system – from EMS to our emergency rooms.
“When we have capacity challenges in the health care delivery system, then the priority is to ensure that the life-threatening and more acute emergencies are taken care of more rapidly,” said Cabanas.
For other medical issues, wait times could potentially grow.
Health experts said the fast spread comes as many of us relax precautions we previously took around COVID – and as we begin to gather again.
But Cabanas said there are things you can do to protect yourself.
“Get your flu shot, make sure you are being cognizant of your contacts,” said Cabanas. “Wash your hands, not touching your face. Make sure you get your covid booster shot.”
The same advice is coming from the white house.
“The most important thing you can do to prepare for your holidays is to get your updated covid vaccine,” said First Lady Jill Biden.
Another way to relieve our local health care system – go to the hospital emergency department if you are at high risk or have concerning symptoms; Other visits may be able to be handled by a primary care physician.
Amgen in Advanced Talks to Buy Horizon Therapeutics
Amgen Inc.
AMGN -2.42%
is in advanced talks to buy drug company
Horizon Therapeutics
HZNP 0.39%
PLC, according to people familiar with the matter, in a takeover likely to be valued at well over $20 billion and mark the largest healthcare merger of the year.
The U.S. biotechnology company was the last of three suitors standing in an auction for Horizon, the people said, after French drugmaker
Sanofi SA
said Sunday it was out of the running.
A deal could be finalized by Monday assuming the talks with Amgen don’t fall apart, the people said.
Horizon develops medicines to treat rare autoimmune and severe inflammatory diseases that are currently sold mostly in the U.S. Its biggest drug, Tepezza, is used to treat thyroid eye disease, an affliction characterized by progressive inflammation and damage to tissues around the eyes.
The company is Nasdaq-listed, but based in Ireland and has operations in Dublin, Deerfield, Ill., and a new facility in Rockville, Md.
Horizon said last month it was fielding takeover interest from Amgen, Sanofi and
Johnson & Johnson,
a disclosure prompted by a Wall Street Journal report.
Johnson & Johnson later said it had dropped out.
Last year, revenue from Tepezza more than doubled, driving Horizon’s overall net sales 47% higher to $3.23 billion. Horizon has said that annual global net sales of the drug are targeted to eventually peak at more than $4 billion as the company aims to win approval to sell it in Europe and Japan.
That type of growth is attractive to big drug companies—with many sitting on big piles of cash—that rely on acquisitions as a key strategy to expand sales. Many big drugmakers are looking for new sources of revenue to offset losses when some of their main products lose patent protection.
Analysts expect Amgen will lose sales when patents begin expiring on its big-selling osteoporosis drugs Prolia and Xgeva later this decade. The pair of drugs accounted for nearly $5.3 billion of Amgen’s $26 billion in revenue last year.
In October, Amgen completed a $3.7 billion deal for ChemoCentryx and its drug to treat a rare immune-system disease.
Adding Horizon would provide more rare immune-disease drugs to Amgen’s lineup, which also includes the biotech’s Enbrel and Otezla immune-disease therapies. Amgen could help sell more of Horizon’s products overseas, according to analysts.
Acquiring Horizon could add about $4 billion in new revenue for Amgen by 2024, according to Jefferies & Co.
Other big life-sciences companies have been inking deals in recent months.
Johnson & Johnson recently struck a $16.6 billion deal to acquire heart device maker Abiomed Inc. to bolster sales of its medical-gear division, which had been lagging behind those of its pharmaceutical unit.
Merck
& Co. followed with a deal of its own, agreeing to buy blood-cancer biotech
Imago BioSciences Inc.
for $1.35 billion, ahead of the patent expiration of its cancer immunotherapy Keytruda.
Pfizer Inc.,
meanwhile, agreed in August to buy Global Blood Therapeutics Inc. for $5.4 billion, in a deal that would give the big drugmaker a foothold in the treatment of sickle-cell disease.
A deal for Horizon would likely rank as the largest healthcare acquisition globally in 2022, ahead of the Johnson & Johnson-Abiomed tie-up. The selloff in stocks this year amid rising interest rates, while putting a damper on deal activity, has also made some companies more attractive targets. At the stock’s peak about a year ago, Horizon was valued at roughly $27 billion.
The shares, which fell sharply earlier this year, have surged since the possibility of a takeover surfaced, and the company now has a market value of about $22 billion.
Horizon’s other drugs include Krystexxa for treating gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis, and Ravicti for a rare, potentially life-threatening genetic disease known as urea cycle disorder that raises ammonia levels in the blood.
Drugs treating rare diseases have emerged as a large source of pharmaceutical sales because they can command high prices that health insurers have been willing to pay.
Write to Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com, Dana Cimilluca at dana.cimilluca@wsj.com and Laura Cooper at laura.cooper@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Theranos Ex-Operating Chief Sunny Balwani Sentenced to Nearly 13 Years in Prison
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Theranos Inc.’s former No. 2 executive, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison for his involvement in an elaborate fraud scheme at the blood-testing company, capping a yearslong saga that became synonymous with the worst of Silicon Valley culture.
Mr. Balwani’s sentencing comes more than four years after the collapse of Theranos, which promised to revolutionize healthcare but peddled faulty technology to patients and investors, along the way delivering inaccurate health results and squandering hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Balwani helped lead the deception as Theranos’s president and chief operating officer, and along with his longtime romantic partner, he became the focus of one of the highest-profile white-collar cases in recent years.
Theranos founder and former chief executive
Elizabeth Holmes,
Mr. Balwani’s ex-girlfriend, was sentenced last month to 11¼ years for four counts of criminal fraud tied to her now-defunct blood-testing startup. The result is an unusual white-collar criminal punishment for Mr. Balwani: being sentenced to a longer prison term than his former boss, who was at the center of the fraud at her company.
Photos: The Testimony of Elizabeth Holmes
Mr. Balwani declined to make a statement when invited to before his sentencing. He also didn’t testify during his trial. That differed from Ms. Holmes, who testified on her own behalf and issued a tearful apology to the judge about the harm she had caused.
The Balwani sentence marks the final chapter in a corporate scandal that erupted more than seven years ago following a series of Wall Street Journal articles that called into question Theranos’s claims about its blood-testing technology.
The reporting triggered criminal and civil investigations into the company and led to the 2018 indictments of Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani on fraud and conspiracy charges. The scandal entered popular American culture, led to a bestselling book, an award-winning Hulu series and a planned movie, in addition to multiple university case studies on corporate fraud.
The once-highflying Theranos now stands as a cautionary signal to Silicon Valley about the criminal risks of misleading investors and consumers about new technology. The sentencing of the top two Theranos executives delivers a remarkable indictment of corporate leaders lying and obfuscating in pursuit of technological and financial success.
“The evidence shows he knew about the fraud,” U.S. District Judge
Edward Davila
said ahead of reading the sentence. He called the crime at Theranos “a true flight from honest business practices.”
Judge Edward Davila declined to find that Sunny Balwani recklessly put patients at risk of death or serious bodily injury.
Photo:
VICKI BEHRINGER/REUTERS
Government prosecutors had requested a 15-year sentence for Mr. Balwani. A report from a probation officer, who provides an objective recommendation for the judge’s consideration, suggested a nine-year sentence. The probation officer found that Mr. Balwani’s crimes fall into the most serious offense category specified by U.S. sentencing guidelines, which carries the possibility of a life prison term.
“Mr. Balwani came to work day after day and made misrepresentations,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Schenk. “Investors believed they were investing in a different company.”
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Are the Theranos sentences appropriate? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
Mr. Balwani, 57 years old, was convicted in July of seven counts of wire fraud and conspiracy against investors in Theranos, and five counts of wire fraud and conspiracy against patients who used Theranos blood tests. His trial showed that Theranos’s blood-testing devices were unreliable and often produced inaccurate results about serious health conditions and that Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes lied about the company’s technology, finances and business prospects.
Following his sentencing, Mr. Balwani briefly spoke quietly with members of his family, who had appeared in court to support him.
“We respectfully disagree with the outcome,” said defense attorney Jeffrey Coopersmith. “We are disappointed with the result and we plan to appeal.” Government prosecutors declined to comment.
Sunny Balwani has unresolved civil fraud charges pending against him from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Photo:
Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal
Theranos’s victims, Judge Davila said, include venture-capital firms Lucas Venture Group and Peer Venture Partners, and individual investors including
Pat Mendenhall
of U.S. Capital Advisors LLC;
Richard Kovacevich,
the ex-CEO of
Wells Fargo
& Co.; and
Rupert Murdoch.
Mr. Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos, is the executive chairman of
News Corp,
which owns the Journal.
“We all screwed up,” said Mr. Mendenhall, an early Theranos investor who testified against Mr. Balwani. “I will never, ever invest in any company again without audited financials.”
Mr. Murdoch declined to comment Wednesday. After Ms. Holmes’s sentencing, he said he blamed only himself for falling for her fraud. Mr. Kovacevich declined to comment.
Judge Davila declined to find that Mr. Balwani recklessly put patients at risk of death or serious bodily injury, which could have added years to his sentence.
“This is a very close call,” Judge Davila said, acknowledging that Mr. Balwani had “oversight and control over the lab situation.”
Mr. Balwani has been ordered to surrender on March 15, 2023, more than a month earlier than Ms. Holmes was ordered to surrender. Ms. Holmes is pregnant with her second child.
“Let this story be a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs in this district: Those who use lies to cover up the shortfalls of their promised accomplishments risk substantial jail time,” Stephanie Hinds, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said in a statement.
Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced last month.
Photo:
Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Balwani joined Theranos in 2009 as vice chairman of its board and the following year became president and chief operating officer, a position he held until 2016. He ran the company’s lab, despite having no medical credentials.
“This is a complete disregard for other people’s lives,” said Mehrl Ellsworth, a retired Arizona dentist who received four Theranos blood tests in 2015, two of which wrongly suggested he had cancer and two that showed he didn’t. The confusion disrupted his life for about six months, he said, delaying a trip to perform volunteer work in Thailand.
The defense sought to pin the blame on Ms. Holmes, who ran the company for years without Mr. Balwani and often made misleading claims as she sought the media spotlight.
“Mr. Balwani joined this company because he believed in the mission of Theranos,” attorney Mr. Coopersmith said in court Wednesday. “He is not Ms. Holmes. He did not pursue fame and recognition and glory.”
Theranos was propelled by claims from Mr. Balwani and Ms. Holmes that their technology could cheaply and quickly run more than 200 health tests using a proprietary finger-prick device that required just a few drops of blood. Their trials showed that the company managed to use its proprietary device for just 12 types of patient tests.
“They knew the tests were inaccurate and they put patients in danger,” said Alan Eisenman, a Texas-based investor who sank about $1.2 million into Theranos and whose investment underpins one of the guilty counts against Mr. Balwani. “That is worse than the financial fraud.”
Mr. Balwani also was responsible for the financial models given to investors that greatly inflated revenue projections, prosecutors said, and he managed the company’s partnership with
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.,
in which Theranos finger-prick tests were offered at the chain’s drugstores.
Theranos raised $945 million from investors, and most of it evaporated.
Mr. Balwani has unresolved civil fraud charges pending against him from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Ms. Holmes settled her charges, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, which included a $500,000 fine.
Alex Shultz, whose son Tyler Shultz worked at Theranos, gave a victim impact statement during Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s sentencing last month.
Photo:
VICKI BEHRINGER/REUTERS
During his time at Theranos, Mr. Balwani sought to shut down internal criticism about the company’s technical and laboratory failings and often rebuffed staffers who brought concerns to him, his trial showed. He was particularly harsh in dealing with Theranos whistleblower
Tyler Shultz,
who complained in an internal 2014 email that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks.
Mr. Balwani belittled Mr. Shultz and then took a swipe at his relationship with
George Shultz,
the late former secretary of state and then a Theranos director.
“The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this personally is because you are Mr. Shultz’s grandson,” wrote Mr. Balwani to the young Mr. Shultz in an email.
In an interview Wednesday after Mr. Balwani was sentenced, Mr. Shultz said: “I’m not rejoicing at them going to prison, but I think it is well deserved.”
“It is just such a relief that it is over,” he said.
Write to Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com and Christopher Weaver at Christopher.Weaver@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Why You Can’t Find Wegovy, the Weight-Loss Drug
Novo Nordisk
NVO 0.61%
A/S flubbed the launch of its buzzy new weight-loss drug Wegovy, missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and squandering a head start before a rival could begin selling a competing product.
Wegovy is among a new class of drugs that health regulators have approved to cut the weight of people who are obese, a goal long sought by doctors and patients. Their weight-dropping potential became a viral sensation on social media. Elon Musk tweeted about Wegovy in October. And a related drug for diabetes, Ozempic, is a hot topic in Hollywood among celebrities seeking to stay thin, according to doctors.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Will Novo Nordisk A/S be able to retain its competitive edge with its weight-loss drug? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
Yet Denmark-based Novo underestimated how big demand for the drug would be, and wasn’t ready to make enough to fill the prescriptions that flooded in after U.S. approval last year. Then a contract manufacturer halted production to address inspection issues.
“We should have forecasted better, which we did not,” Novo Chief Executive
Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen
said. “Had we forecasted that, we would have built a different supply chain.”
The missteps have proven costly for Novo, which was forced to ration Wegovy to patients who already had started taking it. The company has recorded around $700 million in sales to date, well short of the $2 billion in 2021 and 2022 sales that some analysts had projected before supply issues hit.
Novo Nordisk Chief Executive Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen admits the drug company misjudged how popular Wegovy would be.
Photo:
Carsten Snejbjerg/Bloomberg News
Amber Blaylock, a music teacher from Springfield, Mo., said she has been trying to get Wegovy to help her reduce weight since hearing about the drug on TikTok and YouTube. She asked her doctor in September to prescribe it, but hasn’t been able to find it.
“Frustrated and impatient for sure,” said Ms. Blaylock, 29 years old.
To turn things around, Mr. Jørgensen said Novo has increased its capacity to make Wegovy and plans a “relaunch” early next year, which should fulfill all orders.
Novo, however, lost valuable time establishing a beachhead in the lucrative obesity-drug market before rival
Eli Lilly
LLY 1.20%
& Co. can enter. Lilly is expected to launch a similar, competing drug named Mounjaro late next year or in early 2024.
The market for anti-obesity drugs, now worth $2.4 billion worldwide, could reach $50 billion in 2030, Morgan Stanley estimates.
“Novo has left the door open for Lilly,” said BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan David Seigerman.
Mr. Jørgensen said the company can regain lost ground because of high demand for Wegovy and the large potential for what is still a mostly untapped market. He said he was unconcerned with the looming competition with Lilly’s drug, because there is room for both products.
“We disappointed physicians and patients in the first round,” he said. “The company wants to be better prepared for the second round.” Novo lists Wegovy at $1,349 a month. Some commercial insurers cover the drug.
Wegovy works by imitating a hormone called GLP-1, which occurs naturally in the body and suppresses appetite, among other effects.
Novo developed GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes. In 2017, the company began selling semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, under the brand name Ozempic to treat diabetes.
During the drug’s development, Novo found that weight loss was a side effect, prompting the company to probe using semaglutide to treat obesity. A key trial found that Wegovy helped people with a high body-mass index shed up to 15% of their weight, surpassing the results for older obesity drugs like Novo’s Saxenda.
Saxenda and other older weight-loss drugs had sold modestly, partly due to their limited weight loss, as well as some unpleasant side effects and the refusal of many health insurers to pay up.
Novo worked with Catalent to fill its Wegovy weight-loss drug into syringes.
Photo:
yara nardi/Reuters
Given the experience, Novo figured Wegovy sales would increase gradually. To augment its own production, Novo contracted with a single manufacturer,
Catalent Inc.,
to fill the drug into syringes. Novo said it thought it would have time to add manufacturing capacity to meet a gradual increase in demand.
Wegovy may be superior to older drugs, but “we thought it would still be a journey to open up the market,” Mr. Jørgensen said.
When Novo started selling Wegovy in the U.S. in June last year, however, demand took off. Doctors with large followings on social media touted Wegovy as groundbreaking, while users posted photos holding injection pens and shared their progress losing weight.
“Demand for these new agents has been unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my time in medicine,” said Dr. Michael Albert, a physician specializing in weight-loss treatment at telehealth provider Accomplish Health who has consulted for Novo. Many of his patients began asking about Wegovy, he said, after they heard about it in Facebook groups or on TikTok.
It took only five weeks for doctors to write new prescriptions for Wegovy at the same weekly volume that Saxenda took four years to reach, according to Mr. Jørgensen. “It’s a completely different ballgame that we’re in,” said Ambre Brown Morley, the company’s vice president of media and digital global communication.
Within weeks, supplies were strained. Novo warned that patients might experience delays in receiving their prescriptions. Then in December 2021, Catalent temporarily stopped deliveries and manufacturing at its plant after Food and Drug Administration inspections found faulty air filters and damaged equipment.
To date, Novo has recorded around $700 million in Wegovy sales compared with the $2 billion in 2021 and 2022 sales that some analysts had projected before supply issues emerged.
Photo:
JACOB GRONHOLT-PEDERSEN/REUTERS
Many people who couldn’t get Wegovy for weight loss have sought prescriptions for Novo’s Ozempic and Lilly’s Mounjaro, according to analysts, even though the FDA hasn’t approved the latter two drugs for such use. Ozempic sales increased so much that certain doses are in short supply through at least January, the FDA said.
Lilly is studying Mounjaro, its GLP-1-containing drug for diabetes, for weight loss.
Novo and Lilly said they don’t promote their diabetes drugs for the “off-label” use treating obesity.
A Catalent spokesman said the company is still making improvements to the plant and working with customers to limit the impact of supply constraints on patients. The company restarted filling Wegovy syringes at the facility in the spring.
Novo has been amassing a sufficient inventory before the Wegovy relaunch, Mr. Jørgensen said. When Wegovy relaunches, he said, insurance coverage will be broader than when the drug first went on sale.
Write to Peter Loftus at Peter.Loftus@wsj.com and Denise Roland at denise.roland@wsj.com
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