Consumers must be protected from risks of getting skinny jabs through shortcuts

Semaglutide enters the market as a weight loss medication

In March 2023, the UK’s medicines regulator, NICE recommended that specialist weight management services should start offering obese patients weight loss injections containing semaglutide.

Diabetes UK explains that semaglutide increases the levels of hormones, naturally produced by the stomach when we eat. This can lead to weight loss, as many users feel fuller for longer.

In the months that followed we heard similar sounds from across the Atlantic as dozens of Hollywood’s most famous names went public about using weight loss medication. Celebrities began an honest discussion about the physical and emotional challenges faced by people struggling with their weight and the lengths they were going to in order to resolve them.

At about the same time NHS England approved the use of semaglutide on the NHS, for obese patients' who also had a hypertension or cardiovascular disease. Overnight, millions of people became entitled to the treatment but it was clear that many of those who were not, still wanted access.

Alternative sources of semaglutide began appearing with regulators trying to keep up.

The risks

In July 2024, the BBC reported that a “booming black market” was emerging for semaglutide. Its investigation which heard from patients who had become seriously unwell after buying the medication without a prescription.

Then as we set our new year’s resolutions for 2025, there came an urgent warning from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The MHRA’s Criminal Enforcement Unit said it was cracking down on the illegal sale of weight-loss medicines online. 

It warned that these injections are “powerful medicines that can only be legally and safely dispensed against a prescription issued by a healthcare professional” and that as such, they come with side effects.

As a product safety lawyer, I have seen for decades how new treatments can create new hope for people but hidden beneath this wave of possibility, there can be an undercurrent of danger. 

Over the last two years, I have watched as online platforms and non-NHS High Street providers have started offering semaglutide shortcuts. Where GPs are saying no, Dr Search Engine is finding a way to say yes.

When you access these injections on the NHS it is part of a specialist weight management service, which comes with face-to-face clinician-led support, but I am concerned this cannot be said for every source of semaglutide.

More must be done to support those who feel they need to take this medication, and regulators must not back down in their efforts to crack down on those wrongly profiting from vulnerable patients who feel they have nowhere else to turn.