GLP1s Reveal Trump and Big Pharma’s Plan for Medical Caste System

FEATURING RICHARD (RJ) ESKOW - Tens of millions of Americans are using GLP-1s, the miracle drug that started out as a way to help diabetics control blood sugar and that has rapidly fueled a major weight loss industry. While most headlines tend to fixate on how expensive the drugs are, and worse, which celebrity has started using Ozempic, the real story is about how the Trump Administration’s 2025 agreement with major pharmaceutical companies to lower GLP-1 prices creates a healthcare “caste system.”

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a journalist, speechwriter, policy advisor, and occasional musician. He hosts TheZeroHourReport.com, a syndicated radio and television program, where, for full disclosure, Sonali Kolhatkar is a senior correspondent. Richard was lead writer, speechwriter, and editor for 2016 Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and has done lots of other things in his varied and interesting life. His new story in The Nation is called What You Need to Know About the GLP-1 Economy. Richard spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his article.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So usually you're the one asking the questions to me, and this time I get to ask them of you. Tell me about this 2025, I believe it was the end of last year, that the Trump administration announced this big thing that it would do. And in the usual Trump way, he basically promises a thing that he knows people want, well, at least his base might want, and then it turns out to be a whole other thing. So he has ostensibly promised to have lowered or be lowering the high prices of these drugs. What was his actual agreement? 

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Well, first of all, just the very brief history of GLP-1s is that they largely were developed at public expense, at public cost, through publicly funded research. First, pure scientific research. Scientists, curiosity-driven research, wanting to understand why Gila monsters in the desert only needed to eat once or twice a year. 

And from that, which began in the 1980s, they developed a medication for diabetes treatment. Which even though it was largely developed with public funding, as is so often the case, private industry was allowed to take the patents on it and charge exorbitant prices to the rest of us.