How to rule the world

Novo Nordisk is the world’s fastest-growing pharmaceutical company—with one drug

Dear avaricious, egotistical, money-mad humans (yup, that pretty much covers the room), so, you want to rule the world? Pull up a hunch-backed gremlin, get comfy and I’ll tell you how it’s done in my simple six-steps-to-world-domination blueprint.

Step 1: Discover an amino acid that you’ll call semaglutide and market it as Ozempic, which is a mildly effective way to control type 2 diabetes.

Step 2: Forget warnings that it can cause thyroid cancer, pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas), hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), kidney failure, serious allergic reactions and gallbladder problems. Everyone else will forget it, too.

Step 3: Use the same molecule to create a new drug that controls obesity. You’ll call the drug Wegovy, and like Ozempic, it has only a very modest effect. (Last time I looked, it reduced body weight by around 12 percent after over a year. Woo-hoo.)

Step 4: Pay for some research and find an academic who goes crazy for it. He’ll tell my messengers (sorry, I mean the mass media) it’s the new wonder drug that can also treat heart disease and one day could be used to treat Alzheimer’s and cancer. They’ll buy it, and so will governments.

Step 5: Watch the money roll in as you become the world’s fastest-growing drug company.

Step 6: Under no circumstances should you ever explain that a healthy diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, help you lose weight and even manage heart disease—and without all that nasty thyroid cancer business.

Those nice people at Novo Nordisk have followed my six-part plan to the letter, and look where they are now! I say they’re nice people because they’re from Denmark, and everyone likes Danes (other than when they were Vikings, of course; all that marauding, raping and pillaging wasn’t a good look). 

As a result, they’re the world’s fastest-growing pharmaceutical company and the biggest company in Europe. Their economy is bigger than the whole of Denmark’s, but I suppose you can eat only so much bacon.

Sales growth this year is expected to be around 27 percent, and profits should rise 30 percent. Novo Nordisk already controls more than 85 percent of the global weight-loss market with Wegovy, and that’s set to increase as governments get behind it as the solution to the obesity crisis.

Semaglutide, the antidiabetic drug that became a weight-loss drug, has now become a heart drug. The pivotal moment happened last November when a study—paid for by Novo Nordisk, natch—was published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.¹

The drug was tested on 8,803 overweight or obese people who had heart disease, while a similar number were given a placebo. During the three years of the study, 569 participants given the drug died from a heart attack compared to 701 in the placebo group—so that’s 8 percent given a placebo and 6.5 percent taking semaglutide. By the way, twice as many in the semaglutide group had to stop treatment because of life-changing reactions to the drug (that nasty thyroid cancer again, no doubt).

The researchers are an interesting bunch. They’re collectively known as the SELECT Trial Investigators, a group created to assess the effectiveness of semaglutide as a heart therapy. Aside from Novo Nordisk funding the whole thing, members of SELECT either are shareholders in the drug company or have received an honorarium or fee.

The ho-hum results didn’t make much of a splash when they were published. After all, the drug was only as effective as statins. But one of the SELECT group—John Deanfield from University College London (honorarium or fee)—put it on the front page seven months later when he presented the findings to the European Congress on Obesity last May.

He told the media that the drug represented the most significant development in heart therapy since the launch of cholesterol-lowering statins in the 1990s (so the bar is set low to start with). “This fantastic trial really is a game-changer,” he said. “We now have a class of drugs that could equally transform many chronic diseases of aging.” 

Yes, semaglutide isn’t just a diabetes therapy. It isn’t just a weight loss drug. It isn’t just a heart medication. It could be the answer to every disease that strikes the elderly, such as Alzheimer’s, and cancer, and . . . and . . .

So there you have it: your blueprint for ruling the world. Have fun!

Satan

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