Now that we have a cure we mustn’t use it

Professor Chris Whitty says that now we can cure obesity we must not:

Weight-loss drugs cannot rescue the UK from its deepening obesity crisis and produce unpleasant side-effects for many users, the government’s chief medical adviser has said.

Prof Chris Whitty delivered a wide-ranging critique of the drugs during a speech in London on Thursday evening.

“Just relying on the drugs seems to me the wrong answer,” he said.

His scepticism about drugs such as Mounjaro and Wegovy, known as GLP-1 agonists, contrasted with the health secretary, Wes Streeting, who has hailed them as a “real gamechanger” in tackling obesity.

Giving the annual Medical Journalists’ Association lecture, Whitty cautioned against relying too much on the drugs to treat obesity. Tougher action to curb junk food advertising and make food healthier to prevent obesity occurring would be a better course of action to take, he said.

“Does anyone in this group believe that the correct answer is to allow obesity to rise because of pretty aggressive marketing of obesogenic foods to children and them stick them on GLP-1 agonists at the age of 18? I think it is shocking if that is where we end up.

“Really, is our answer to say ‘give up on public health’, which we know will work, in children and then just rely on drugs to get us out of a hole? I do not think this is a socially acceptable answer. Actually, I do not think that’s a medically acceptable answer, because these drugs are not benign,” Whitty said.

As Professor Whitty did not go on to say:

None of us here went into the public health business just to sort out the problems of the public’s health. There are, of course, those liberals out there who try to insist that people should be allowed to get on with life as they wish. But that is, obviously, not the point at all. Why would we have a vast bureaucracy, the force of law behind it, if the purpose of life was that the proles were not to be subject to the solid thwack of firm governance? That the bureaucracy exists, that we are in it, is proof that those so called liberal freedoms are a phantasm and that we should tell everyone what to do.

The meeting closed with Dr Heinz Kiosk leading the roaring crowd in a chant of “We are all guilty!”

Tim Worstall