Weight loss “wonder drug” Wegovy will cost Irish users around €220 a month as it is not currently availably under either the Drug Payments Scheme or free to medical card holders.
Wegovy has been shown in trials to deliver average weight loss of around 15 per cent in patients with obesity alongside a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity. It comes in a device like a pen that users inject themselves with on a weekly basis.
Manufactured by Danish group Novo Nordisk, it contains the same drug semaglutide as the company’s Ozempic medicine though it is available in higher doses.
While Ozempic is approved for use in Ireland as a diabetes drug, neither it nor Wegovy is sanctioned for reimbursement as a treatment for obesity, although it has been approved by the European Medicines Agency. The same is true of rival Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro
That means none of the three weight loss drugs is available under the Drug Payment Scheme, which limits monthly medicine costs to €80. They also cannot be prescribed under the medical card scheme.
As a result, patients will have to pay up to €2,640 a year to access the Wegovy. That is less than the cost of Mounjaro, which promises slightly higher weight loss, though Novo Nordisk notes that its Wegovy is the only brand “proven to deliver a 20 per cent reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events”.
In an interview earlier this month, Camilla Sylvest, the Novo Nordisk executive in charge of new drug roll-out, said the company now expected that, outside the US, the majority of access to Wegovy would be through “out of pocket payments”.
“Wegovy is in many countries reimbursed for a very limited population, but then people are very willing to pay themselves out of pocket,” she said. “People see the weight loss immediately, but they also, of course, understand the impact on comorbidities and, hence, they are willing to pay themselves.”
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Novo Nordisk has applied to the HSE to have Wegovy covered by the State medicine schemes as far back as early 2022. That process is ongoing.
However, Prof Michael Barry, who assesses medicines’ value for money in his role as director of the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE), said recently that even if the State agreed to pay for weight loss drugs, it would probably be limited to certain patients.
“I don’t envisage a situation where all patients who would potentially benefit from these drugs will actually be receiving them through the community drug schemes,” he said. “I just think that that would be unaffordable.”
