Ozempic Lawsuit Targets Novo Nordisk Failure to Warn

So far, this is just a sad story. But it’s a lawsuit because, as Symonds alleges, Novo Nordisk knew or should have known about this dangerous side effect but failed to warn Ozempic patients.

The Complaint is encyclopedic in its coverage of Novo Nordisk’s years-long effort to manipulate patients, doctors and the market for a magic “fat shot.” It was more than aggressive; it was deceptive.  

 
NAION

The simplest way to understand NAION is that it is like a stroke affecting the eye. Insufficient blood flow to the optic nerve causes sudden painless vision loss in one eye at a time. Quite rare, it ordinarily affects 2-10 people in the United States per year.

However, recent studies, including one published in JAMA Ophthalmology, have found that the use of semaglutide-containing drugs, like Ozempic, was associated with a much higher risk of NAION than the population in general. For those taking semaglutide medications, the risk was more than seven times higher.

Symptoms of NAION vision loss may include:

• loss of vision upon waking;
• dark area or shadow in vision;
• blurred vision;
• loss of color vision and/or contrast;
• light sensitivity;
• periocular eye pain; and
• headache.

It may affect one eye or both and, as it progresses, can result in total blindness. Novo Nordisk maintains that Ozempic does not cause NAION, but the scientific findings raise significant questions.

Questions aside, the marketing machine churned on

The Complaint alleges that Defendants created and expanded the market for weight-loss medication by:

• spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing to doctors and patients;
• advocating for obesity to be classified as a disease and changing the medical consensus on how to treat that disease, thereby expanding the market for their drugs;
• implementing cutting-edge and multifaceted marketing campaigns that were so effective they ingrained these drugs into pop culture; and
• spending millions to get weight-loss medications covered under public and private insurance.

At the same time, the pharmaceutical giant appears to have hidden the facts that:

• the drugs do not result in meaningful weight loss for up to 15 percent of people;
• the average weight loss for someone taking the drugs is a modest 10.09 percent of the person’s body weight;
• people who do lose weight by taking drugs like Ozempic will need to stay on the medication for the rest of their lives to maintain the weight loss; and
• it’s not healthy weight loss. Sometimes people lose muscle, not fat, a condition known as sarcopenia.

Novo Nordisk allegedly worked to degrade popular trust in the prevailing view that lifestyle changes like proper nutrition and exercise (and in severe cases bariatric surgery) were the keys to health and could accomplish long-lasting weight loss and management for most people.

Their efforts worked. The U.S. semaglutide market is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2030 with total U.S. users comprising about 9 percent of the population.

Shouldn’t Novo Nordisk have warned Geoffrey Symonds?

The Symonds Complaint has 12 counts. Some are about negligence; some are about deliberate malfeasance; others are about design defects. But the same question is at the root of all of them. Shouldn’t Novo Nordisk have disclosed the troubling questions, so that patients and doctors could make an informed decision?

Or did the money machine just keep cranking along?

Duty to warn

A manufacturer has a legal duty to warn consumers about potential dangers associated with their products, especially when those dangers are not obvious or well-known. This duty extends to foreseeable uses and even reasonably foreseeable dangers inherent in the product. Very few consumers can independently evaluate the safety of prescription drugs, especially in the face of an effective marketing campaign.

The strength of the duty depends on the strength of mounting evidence. The increasing scientific data about the harms that could result from Ozempic suggests that Novo Nordisk either knew or should have known that there was evidence that the use of Ozempic could cause patients to develop NAION.