Ozempic Über Alles

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You’ve heard all the arguments before.

Ozempic is good because it helps people who want to lose weight lose weight; bad because it puts pressure on people to use it when they might not want to; good because it’s effective against all manner of diseases besides obesity; bad because of unknown side effects; and on, and on, and on.

Next to the Master Argument for Ozempic, these points are but wispy shadows. In light of the Master Argument for Ozempic, you could grant the worst case scenario for semaglutides—that they cause magic, flesh-eating genital warts in 5% of users, increase fatphobic social scripts by 60%, etc.—and there would still be an overwhelming case not only for preserving the Ozempic status quo, but for stocking vending machines with semaglutides, for dropping them from state-sponsored helicopters, for handing them out on street corners like weight-loss missionary tracts.

In a nutshell: Ozempic causes people who eat a disproportionate amount of meat, fish, and eggs to eat less meat, less fish, and fewer eggs; the benefits of this to animal welfare are so gargantuan that they make the worst case scenario well worth it.

As a result, we should not only celebrate Ozempic—hold Ozempic parades with Ozempic floats, run round-the-clock Ozempic commercials, flood the zone with Ozempic—but turbo-charge its availability with laxer laws and public money, to make sure its uptake is faster.

I am being intentionally provocative, but I am otherwise entirely serious. Ozempic is good news for farmed animals and, given the scale and horror of industrial farming, their interests in not being bred into a life of torture trump our (real, legitimate) interests in not being fat-shamed and caused to suffer unfortunate, non-lethal side effects of medicines that we volunarily injected.

There is a short YouTube video with almost no views by Dr. Chris Bryant—a social scientist who works on alternative proteins and meat consumption—who tries to calculate the number of animals GLP-1s like Ozempic will save. He takes a low-ball estimate from UBS Investment Bank that there will be 40 million GLP-1 users worldwide by 2029, and estimates that between then and 2035 (where the number of users could rise, more speculatively, to 80 million), and estimates that in that period the total number of animals saved by GLP-1s could be between 114-479 million per year.

This figure mostly counts wild caught fish; zooming in on farmed animals on both land and sea, the number shrinks to 20-85 million per year—smaller, but still ginormous.

I can’t think of any plausible downside of Ozempic that would be worse than tens of millions of sentient farm animals being tortured on a yearly basis.¹

Objection: if the worst case scenario for Ozempic pans out, then even if the drug’s effects would be good on balance, it’s still Not Woke to support it because, I don’t know, humans have a stringent right not to be exposed to fatphobic social scripts, which you may never override for the greater good of non-human animals.

Reply: a tram is speeding down the tracks. If it remains on course, it will mow down a family of dogs, crush their legs, and cause them to suffer slow and agonized deaths; if you pull the lever and switch tracks, the tram driver will see a plus-sized person out the window and yell out: Hey man, sorry to bother you, have you thought about using Ozempic? It was really helpful for me in my weightloss journey!

That outcome would be regrettable, no doubt, and the plus-sized person might even have a ‘right’ against being exposed to this fat-phobic social script. But clearly you should grit your teeth and switch tracks, just as we should switch tracks on Ozempic and sell it half-off in the poultry section.

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1. You might wonder whether the drug has minor downsides vis-à-vis animal welfare—maybe some people who are vegan for weight-loss reasons will use Ozempic and then switch back to eating meat—but it’s hard to make the case that the drug won’t be good on balance.