Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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Consultants assessing Covid vaccine damage claims on behalf of the NHS have been paid millions more than the victims, it has emerged. Freedom of Information requests made by The Telegraph show that US-based Crawford and Company has carried out nearly 13,000 medical assessments, but dismissed more than 98 per cent of cases. Just 203 claimants have been notified they are entitled to a one-off payment of Ł120,000 through the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) amounting to Ł24,360,000. Yet Crawford and Company has received Ł27,264,896 for its services. Prof Richard Goldberg, chairman in law at Durham University, with a special interest in vaccine liability and compensation, said: "The idea that this would be farmed out to a private company to make a determination is very odd. It's taxpayers money and money is tight at the moment. "The lack of transparency is not helpful and there is a terrible sense of secrecy about all of this. One gets the sense that their main objective is for these cases not to succeed. "There are no stats available so we don't know the details about how these claims are being decided or whether previous judgments are being taken into account." The Hart (Health Advisory and Recovery Team) group, which was set up by medical professionals and scientists during the pandemic, has warned that Crawford and Company has a "troubling reputation with numerous reports of mismanagement and claims denials across various sectors".
Note: COVID vaccine manufacturers have total immunity from liability if people die or become injured as a result of the vaccine. Our Substack dives into the complex world of COVID vaccines with nuance and balanced investigation. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID vaccine problems.
Thessy Mehrain founded the Women in Blockchain community in 2016. One of Mehrain's most consistent messages is that gender equity in blockchain–and tech in general–isn't a women's issue. "Men become allies once they understand the benefits," she says. "Most companies, especially in the early blockchain days, were run by men." ETHDenver ... hosted a session featuring Njambi Njoroge, Operations Director of Grassroots Economics Foundation in Kenya. The organization has been pioneering community-driven economies by digitizing traditional mutual-aid systems with blockchain. "Njambi talked about how collaboration has always been at the core of Kenyan communities," Mehrain explains. "For centuries, people have come together to build houses, till land, and share resources. Now, with blockchain, they can track these commitments and scale them beyond their immediate community. In the West, our economies are increasingly relying on central authorities–where â€trusted middlemen' own everyone's data and hold the power. But in many places, economies are rooted in collaboration. One of the features of technologies like blockchain is to add a trust infrastructure that allows to remove central entities, and create cooperative economies." "It's not about gender–it's about mindset," she explains. "The masculine principle is about domination–the winner is who gets there first at any price. The feminine principle is about collaboration–winning is defined by getting there first as well but accounts also for the impact on others. You only win together.
Note: Watch our 13 minute video on the promise of blockchain technology. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and technology for good.
The owner of a data brokerage business recently ... bragged about the degree to which his industry could collect and analyze data on the habits of billions of people. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun said that ... his company [can] deliver "personalized messaging at scale" to some 91 percent of the internet's adult web users. To deliver that kind of "personalized messaging" (i.e., advertising), Publicis must gather an extraordinary amount of information on the people it serves ads to. Lena Cohen, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that data brokers like Publicis collect "as much information as they can" about web users. "The data broker industry is under-regulated, opaque, and dangerous, because as you saw in the video, brokers have detailed information on billions of people, but we know relatively little about them," Cohen said. "You don't know what information a data broker has on you, who they're selling it to, and what the people who buy your data are doing with it. There's a real power/knowledge asymmetry." Even when state-level privacy regulations are passed (such as the California Consumer Privacy Law), those cases are often not given enough focus or resources for the laws to be enforced effectively. "Most government agencies don't have the resources to enforce privacy laws at the scale that they're being broken," Cohen said. Cohen added that she felt online behavioral advertising–that is, advertising that is based on an individual web user's specific browsing activity–should be illegal. Banning behavioral ads would "fundamentally change the financial incentive for online actors to constantly surveil" web users and share their data with brokers, Cohen said.
Note: Read more about the disturbing world of online behavioral ads, where the data isn't just used to sell products. It's often accessed by governments, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other actors–sometimes without warrants or oversight. This turns a commercial ad system into a covert surveillance network. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
Careless People [is] a whistleblowing book by a former [Meta] senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams. In the 78-page document that Wynn-Williams filed to the SEC ... it was alleged that Meta had for years been making numerous efforts to get into the biggest market in the world. These efforts included: developing a censorship system for China in 2015 that would allow a "chief editor" to decide what content to remove, and the ability to shut down the entire site during "social unrest"; assembling a "China team" in 2014 for a project to develop China-compliant versions of Meta's services; considering the weakening of privacy protections for Hong Kong users; building a specialised censorship system for China with automatic detection of restricted terms; and restricting the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese government critic. In her time at Meta, Wynn-Williams observed many of these activities at close range. Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect, "an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information". What strikes the reader is that Meta and its counterparts are merely the digital equivalents of the oil, mining and tobacco conglomerates of the analogue era.
Note: A former Meta insider revealed that the company's policy on banning hate groups and terrorists was quietly reshaped under political pressure, with US government agencies influencing what speech is permitted on the platform. Watch our new video on the risks and promises of emerging technologies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
In many parts of the world, building a house or farming a field means taking out loans. But in Kenya, a time-tested system of mutual aid ... has long been the foundation of local economies. Now, Grassroots Economics Foundation is bringing this age-old practice into the digital age. At the helm of this transformation is Njambi Njoroge, Operations Director at Grassroots Economics. Grassroots Economics is built on a concept called "commitment pooling," inspired by indigenous economic systems. Traditionally, in Kenyan villages, neighbours would come together to build houses, farm land, or provide childcare, repaying each other in labor rather than money. These informal debts balanced themselves over time, ensuring that no one was left behind. "We're not inventing anything new," Njoroge says. "We're automating what has always existed." Using blockchain, Grassroots Economics formalizes these commitments into digital vouchers–secure, trackable tokens that represent labor, goods, or services. The blockchain-powered system functions as a local exchange, where people contribute their skills and pull from a shared pool of community resources. The technology ensures that every commitment has a unique digital signature, preventing fraud and allowing real-time tracking of transactions. "On our platform, Sarafu.network, you can see all the transactions happening in a village–how many houses were built, how many farms were tilled, how much labor was exchanged," Njoroge explains. With blockchain, communities can see tangible data showing how much work they've accomplished together.
Note: Grassroots Economics won the 2019 Newsweek Blockchain Impact award for its innovative use of blockchain. Watch our 13 minute video on the promise of blockchain technology. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and technology for good.
There's a popular saying in Mexico. Without corn, there is no country. This week, Mexico's leaders voted to enshrine that concept in the Constitution, declaring native corn "an element of national identity" and banning the planting of genetically modified seeds. The measure, which aims to protect Mexico's thousands of varieties of heirloom corn from engineered versions sold by American companies, has become a nationalist rallying cry. "Corn is Mexico," President Claudia Sheinbaum said recently, describing the reform as a way to secure Mexico's sovereignty. "We have to protect it for biodiversity but also culturally, because corn is what intrinsically links us to our origins, to the resistance of Indigenous peoples." The amendment to the Constitution comes after the defeat in December of a related effort that sought to phase out all imports of genetically modified corn. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a presidential decree in 2023 banning the use of genetically engineered corn in dough and tortillas and for animal feed and industrial use, but a trade dispute panel ruled that it violated the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Mexico agreed to abide by the panel's ruling, and this week's action targets seeds, not all products. "There's a disturbing level of contamination of native maize with genetically modified traits," said Timothy Wise, a researcher at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.
Note: GMO corn from the US threatens the biological integrity of Mexico's traditional corn varieties. Chemical manufacturer Monsanto worked with US officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning a plan to ban glyphosate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on GMOs and food system corruption.
In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to detain up to 30,000 immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally at Guantanamo Bay ahead of deportation as part of his hard-line crackdown. Trump said he was signing an executive order "to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay." 41 migrants were at the Guantánamo Bay base awaiting deportation, nearly evenly divided between low and high threat levels. All have since been flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, on non-military aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday, where they are being held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing facility, according to a U.S. official who spoke to ABC News. California Democrat Rep. Sara Jacobs toured the facilities on Friday as part of a bipartisan delegation from the House Armed Services Committee. Jacobs told ABC News that officials at Guantanamo Bay said it cost $16 million to stand up the migrant camp, noting that each tent allegedly cost $3.1 million to construct, despite not being up to DHS standards. U.S. officials told ABC News the tents did not comply with ICE's requirements for migrant detention, including provisions for air-conditioning and other amenities. Some of the hundreds of U.S. troops sent to Guantánamo Bay to prepare the base for housing migrants may be reassigned to assist with the southern border mission in another capacity.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.
Lawmakers are facing a deadline to reauthorize the federal program providing insurance to homeowners when private insurers abandon their climate-battered locales. The 56-year-old program holds nearly five million policies and more than $22 billion in liabilities. It was envisioned as a stopgap measure for the working class – but the wealthy are now exploiting the program at the expense of low-income homeowners. That includes Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. A 2020 study ... found that the program "provides a substantial subsidy to upper-income groups." How? By charging lower-income households higher premiums than high-income households – even though the latter's properties are generating far higher loss ratios. The study found that "almost all of the excess (flood) losses are in the highest income segments" because "insufficient premium is collected from the higher income groups." In other words, "Buyers that can most afford the premium are not paying their proper rate." Facing the program's March 14 expiration, lawmakers have been trying again to greenlight it with few reforms. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently gummed up the works with amendments barring the program from insuring second homes and placing a cap on eligible home values. "Is there some level of rich person's mansion that maybe the average ordinary taxpayer should not have to subsidize their insurance?" Paul asked.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is releasing new information on a financier's ties to Jeffrey Epstein's operations, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee announced. Since 2022, the committee has been investigating billionaire financier Leon Black – who co-founded and previously led asset management firm Apollo Global Management as CEO and has made payments to Epstein. Wyden is calling on the Department of Justice, the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "lift the veil" on financial support for Epstein. Wyden sent a letter to the federal agencies, providing the new findings from the committee's investigation, which is looking into payments of at least $158 million from Black to Epstein for "purported tax and estate planning advice." Wyden says the investigation led to new evidence through federal government records that show funds from Black to Epstein were used to finance Epstein's sex trafficking operations. The Finance Committee also obtained a 2023 settlement agreement between Black and the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Under the $62 million settlement, Black gained immunity from criminal prosecution in the USVI for financially supporting Epstein, according to Wyden, noting the settlement acknowledges "Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations." A major U.S. bank waited seven years to report Black's payments to Epstein to the Treasury Department.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial system corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex and blackmail ring.
An ex-JPMorgan Chase executive testified in London court that Jeffrey Epstein knew more about what was going on at the top levels of the bank than he did. Jes Staley – who went on to become chief executive of Barclays following his stint at JPMorgan – claimed that Epstein, the convicted child sex offender and disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019, had a "remarkable ability" to gather Wall Street intel. "Mr. Epstein was also well connected within the upper levels of JPMorgan itself," Staley said during his second day in the witness box as he appealed a proposed ban and $2.3 million fine from London's financial regulatory agency. "He seemed to be aware of things relating to the bank, that I was not aware of," Staley added. Staley – who is attempting to overturn a lifetime ban that the Financial Conduct Authority announced in 2023 – acknowledged his relationship with Epstein went beyond work. In 2000, JPMorgan's then-chief executive Douglas "Sandy" Warner told Staley he should get to know Epstein, Staley claimed in his witness statement. "Sandy Warner recommended that I should become acquainted with Mr. Epstein because he was an exceptionally well connected man who could help me, in my capacity at JPM, to form business relationships with influential and other well connected individuals," he said. Staley claimed he was not the only high-level figure at JPMorgan in touch with Epstein.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial system corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex and blackmail ring.
Animal factories–industrial-scale factory farm livestock operations–create ideal conditions for the emergence and rapid spread of disease, including avian flu. High-density confinement, genetic uniformity, and poor air quality weaken birds' immune systems and enable viruses to mutate and transmit quickly. Unlike in natural settings, where biodiversity and space act as buffers against disease, factory farms concentrate thousands or even millions of animals in close quarters, amplifying viral loads and increasing the risk of spillover to wild birds and even humans. The industry's reliance on mass culling, vaccines, and "biosecurity measures" fails to address the root cause of so many food safety and food security crises: an unnatural, high-stress system that prioritizes profit over resilience. Nowhere is this more evident than in today's egg crisis, resulting in soaring prices, plummeting availability, and over 120 million chickens killed due to avian flu scares. Under current protocols, if just one bird in a 100,000-strong confined flock is suspected of infection, the entire flock is exterminated. In conventional caged systems, as many as 500,000 hens suffer in a single facility, each trapped in a space barely larger than a sheet of printer paper. Even in so-called "cage-free" systems, up to 100,000 hens can be packed into a single barn, enduring a relentless cycle of laying, exhaustion, and slaughter.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.
In his first meeting with top executives from PepsiCo, W.K. Kellogg, General Mills and other large companies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, bluntly told them that a top priority would be eliminating artificial dyes from the nation's food supply. Later on Monday, Mr. Kennedy issued a directive that would also affect food companies nationwide. He ordered the Food and Drug Administration to revise a longstanding policy that allowed companies – independent of any regulatory review – to decide that a new ingredient in the food supply was safe. Put in place decades ago, the policy was aimed at ingredients like vinegar or salt that are widely considered to be well-understood, and benign. But the designation, known as GRAS, or "generally recognized as safe," has since grown to include a far broader array of natural and synthetic additives. Mr. Kennedy had vowed to upend the food system as a way to address growing rates of chronic disease and other health concerns even before his appointment as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. He now oversees the F.D.A. Advocates for food safety have criticized the existing GRAS policy as a loophole that enables food companies to introduce untested ingredients that in some cases have proven hazardous. About 1,000 ingredients deemed safe have been reviewed by the F.D.A., but Mr. Kennedy targeted the ones that companies deem acceptable with no government oversight.
Note: Read our latest Substack article on how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporate cartels fueling America's health crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.
A big challenge for democracies today is a decline in trust. The share of Americans who trust government, for example, has fallen from 77% to 22% since 1964. The latest attempt to build trust in the United States is a new online, state-run public forum called Engaged California. The effort aims to prompt, gather, and synthesize conversations about the state's response to the Los Angeles wildfires into reforms. When Taiwan began a similar program in 2014, approval for the government was below 10%. Within eight years, it was 70%, although other factors contributed. The idea of designing civic spaces for civil dialogue has been best expressed in citizen assemblies. Two decades ago, for instance, British Columbia's premier wanted to reform the electoral system but knew few people would trust the government to do it. So he recruited a wide-ranging group of citizens, asking them to devise a solution after listening to a diversity of experts. Citizen assemblies have helped build mutual trust, found Stephen Elstub, professor of democratic politics. "Because [they] require participants to listen to each other's views and debate in an informed and reasonable way," he wrote, "they can improve the quality of democracy." These assemblies have been used worldwide, most notably to help Ireland navigate fraught topics such as abortion. Before they worked in such groups, 72% of participants were dissatisfied with how democracy was working. Afterward, dissatisfaction dropped to 54%.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders - including restless leg syndrome (RLS) - say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour. Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs - given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move - ruined their lives. A report by drugs firm GSK - seen by the BBC - shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as "deviant" sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson's. Some of the women who described being drawn to risky sexual behaviour told us they had no idea of what was causing it. Others said they felt compelled to gamble or shop with no history of such activities. Impulsive behaviours, including gambling and increased sex drive, have long been listed as side effects in medicine leaflets for dopamine agonist drugs - and are thought to affect between 6% to 17% of RLS patients taking them, according to health guidance body NICE. The cases of what the GSK report from 2003 described as "deviant behaviour" involved two men who were prescribed Ropinirole for Parkinson's disease. In one, a 63-year-old-man sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl, leading to a custodial sentence. In the second case, a 45-year-old man carried out "uncontrolled acts of exhibitionism and indecent behaviour".
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption.
Of the 17 years that I've been incarcerated for killing an abusive boyfriend, I spent eight – from 2016 to last May – in what the state calls "restrictive housing," but I call "solitary confinement" or "the hole." In women's prisons, sexual intrusion, harassment, coercion and violence are daily realities. And in solitary confinement, this conduct is so routine that many women – particularly the younger ones – don't even think of it as abuse. They believe it's simply an inevitable part of their incarceration. In 2023, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TCDJ) reported over 700 allegations of staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse and harassment to the PREA Ombudsman, an independent office that tallies up and investigates complaints. Almost 90 of those cases involved sexual harassment, nearly 150 were categorized as voyeurism, and a little more than 500 were classified as sexual abuse. Of the 505 abuse claims, only 20% met the prison system's onerous criteria for sexual assault or "improper sexual activity with a person in custody." On the outside, fewer than half of sexual violence cases are reported to police. Given the power dynamics of prison, underreporting is likely more severe here. Guards use a variety of methods to retaliate against women who complain about their abuse. They can write bogus disciplinary infractions that can lead to ... a longer sentence. Officers can also turn off the electricity and running water in women's cells and refuse to serve them meals.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.
The Pentagon's technologists and the leaders of the tech industry envision a future of an AI-enabled military force wielding swarms of autonomous weapons on land, at sea, and in the skies. Assuming the military does one day build a force with an uncrewed front rank, what happens if the robot army is defeated? Will the nation's leaders surrender at that point, or do they then send in the humans? It is difficult to imagine the services will maintain parallel fleets of digital and analog weapons. The humans on both sides of a conflict will seek every advantage possible. When a weapon system is connected to the network, the means to remotely defeat it is already built into the design. The humans on the other side would be foolish not to unleash their cyber warriors to find any way to penetrate the network to disrupt cyber-physical systems. The United States may find that the future military force may not even cross the line of departure because it has been remotely disabled in a digital Pearl Harbor-style attack. According to the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Defense reported 12,077 cyber-attacks between 2015 and 2021. The incidents included unauthorized access to information systems, denial of service, and the installation of malware. Pentagon officials created a vulnerability disclosure program in 2016 to engage so-called ethical hackers to test the department's systems. On March 15, 2024, the program registered its 50,000th discovered vulnerability.
Note: For more, watch our 9-min video on the militarization of Big Tech.
The Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission has removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed. On the FTC's website, the page hosting all of the agency's business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden's administration. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws. Removing blogs raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official tells WIRED. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership would place "warning" labels above previous administrations' public decisions it no longer agreed with, the source said, fearing that removal would violate the law. Since President Donald Trump designated Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as FTC chair in January, the Republican regulator has vowed to leverage his authority to go after big tech companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson's criticisms center around the Republican party's long-standing allegations that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, censor conservative speech online.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and government corruption.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. "We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense," he said. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government ... the U.S military's golf habit is not on chopping block. The Trump administration announced this week that hundreds of federal properties were available for sale. The General Services Administration, the government's real estate arm, released a list of 443 structures and properties deemed "not core to government operations." Currently, no military golf courses are up for sale on the GSA's website.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government waste.
Feeding incarcerated people has become big business. The food behemoth Aramark (which also services colleges, hospitals, and sports stadiums), as well as smaller corporations like Summit Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, have inked contracts in the last decade worth hundreds of millions of dollars in prisons and jails across the country. The industry was worth almost $3.2 billion in 2022. Cell phone images smuggled out of jails and prisons across the country reveal food that hardly looks edible, let alone nutritious. At a jail in Cleveland, staff warned administrators in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity were so disgusting, that they put staff in danger. A 2020 study by the criminal justice reform advocacy group Impact Justice found that 94% of incarcerated people surveyed said they did not receive enough food to feel full. More than 60% said they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables. Meager portions have left desperate people eating toothpaste and toilet paper. Most states spend less than $3 per person per day on prison food – and some as little as $1.02. The Food and Drug Administration's "thrifty plan" estimates that feeding an adult man "a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet" costs about $10 per day. The major private food providers also have a stake in the booming prison commissary business, where incarcerated people can buy staples like ramen, tuna and coffee. Poor food served in the chow hall drives hungry prisoners to the commissary.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the food system.
US taxpayers spent an estimated $6 billion researching, developing, and implementing new blockbuster weight-loss drugs. Yet Americans are now paying pharmaceutical giants – including one in Denmark – up to eleven times more for these medicines than patients in other countries, markups that are inflating consumers' insurance premiums and risk bankrupting the country's health care system. According to data shared with the Lever by researchers at Bentley University, the federal government spent $6.2 billion from 1980 to 2024 on the discovery and development of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) molecules, as well as research on how to use GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes, obesity, and other diseases. GLP-1, a hormone that regulates blood sugar, was the foundation of the diabetes drug Ozempic, whose 2017 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a wave of other GLP-1-based diabetes and weight-loss medications coming to market. More than fifteen million people nationwide currently take GLP-1-related drugs like Ozempic, bringing in more than $50 billion in sales for pharmaceutical companies in 2024 – much of which went to the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. A Senate report ... found that if half of all Medicare and Medicaid patients with obesity took Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, it could cost the federal health care system $166 billion per year.
Note: The makers of these weight-loss drugs could be hit with over 10,000 lawsuits over severe adverse events from these drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.