The Ozempic Revolution Is Stuck
Yasmin Tayag
The irony undergirding the new wave of obesity drugs is that they initially weren't created for obesity at all. The weight loss spurred by Ozempic, a diabetes drug in the class of so-called GLP-1 agonists, gave way to Wegovy--the same drug, repackaged for obesity. Zepbound, another medication, soon followed. Now these drugs have a new purpose: heart health.On Friday, the FDA approved the use of Wegovy for reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death in adults who are overweight and have ca...
The Return of Measles
Daniel Engber
Measles seems poised to make a comeback in America. Two adults and two children staying at a migrant shelter in Chicago have gotten sick with the disease. A sick kid in Sacramento, California, may have exposed hundreds of people to the virus at the hospital. Three other people were diagnosed in Michigan, along with seven from the same elementary school in Florida. As of Thursday, 17 states have reported cases to the CDC since the start of the year. (For comparison, that total was 19, plus the Dis...
Everything Can Be Meat
Yasmin Tayag
Recently, a photo of rice left me confused. The rice itself looked tasty enough--fluffy, well formed--but its oddly fleshy hue gave me the creeps. According to the scientists who'd developed it, each pink-tinged grain was seeded with muscle and fat cells from a cow, imparting a nutty, umami flavor.In one sense, this "beef rice" was just another example of lab-grown meat, touted as a way to eat animals without the ethical and environmental impacts. Though not yet commercially available, the rice was...
Pfizer Couldn't Pay for Marketing This Good
Jacob Stern
On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson's shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure. Things only accelerated from there: In January 2022, he re...
The Science Behind Ozempic Was Wrong
Sarah Zhang
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you're full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight.The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and ...
The Pandemic's 'Ghost Architecture' Is Still Haunting Us
Yasmin Tayag
Last Friday, in a bathroom at the Newark airport, I encountered a phrase I hadn't seen in a long time: Stop the spread. It accompanied an automatic hand-sanitizing station, which groaned weakly when I passed my hand beneath it, dispensing nothing. Presumably set up in the early pandemic, the sign and dispenser had long ago become relics. Basically everyone seemed to ignore them. Elsewhere in the terminal, I spotted prompts to maintain a safe distance and reduce overcrowding, while maskless passen...