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Health Secretary Wes Streeting has dismissed suggestions that plans to provide weight loss jabs to unemployed people with obesity are “dystopian”.
The UK government is partnering with pharmaceutical giant Lilly who are running a five-year trial in Greater Manchester to test if the weight-loss drug Mounjaro can help get more people back to work and prevent obesity-related diseases to ease the strain on the NHS in England.
The announcement prompted a backlash, with accusations that the government was stigmatising unemployed individuals and reducing people to their economic value.
Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Streeting said the jabs were part of a broader healthcare plan, adding that he was “not interested in some dystopian future where I involuntarily jab unemployed people who are overweight”.
Calling this dystopian is fucking stupid.
It’d be far more dystopian for unemployed people to not be offered effective medication for a condition that causes a shit load of negative health effects.
How fucked are we as a society when we are beginning to see freely available effective medical treatments as being dystopian.
Isn’t the dystopian bit of this the scary capitalism of it? This approach allows the food industry to continue selling people crap that is making them unhealthy rather than reforming their business model, and it’s doing this by handing a massive amount of money to the pharma industry. This is exactly the solution I’d want if I were a wealthy investor with money in lots of vast global businesses, and for me that’s the dystopian bit - the way it’s all about handing money to The Man to continue unhealthy lives rather than, y’know, fix anything a bit
But this drug doesn’t do that. A major way it works is by massively curtailing your appetite.
This literally helps you stop endlessly consuming.
If we’re going to twist this into a thing related to capitalism, then it is an anti-capitalist medication.
It’s the diametric opposite of what you suggest.
The drug works mostly by them no longer wanting to eat it.
This isn’t a way to lose weight without changing diet, it’s a way to change diet.
Sure, appetite drops a bit in that specific person, but this still doesn’t do anything to motivate the big food industry to change its ways - they can assume that specific person will still eat their products, and can carry on selling ultra-processed food to everyone else
I hear you. But this isn’t necessarily one or the other. I think it’s beneficial to have these types of product available for those who have already become obese, whilst leglistating the food that people are pushed towards eating by the system.
I’m not saying that the government will necessarily do both, but that it’s not an issue with this study that the food available isn’t being managed.
Yeah, I take umbrage with the verbage. It would be dystopian to force people with a high BMI onto the drugs
I wouldn’t say dystopian, I’d say possibly problematic. After all they would be healthier if they weren’t overweight.
However it’s irrelevant because that’s not happening