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”.
The headline is making it sound bad but there’s nothing but good in here.
All that is happening here is that they are offering weight loss drugs. Your employment states is basically has no bearing on it, it’s just only being offered to unemployed people for now two as it is part of a study to see if being overweight is an impact to finding a job.
We already know that it does. But now we have something that reliably will be able to modify that factor. Actually seems like a fairly good study.