Joseph Hart 24 February 2025

 

Late last year, Wes Streeting sat down with the BBC’s Laura Kissenberg to discuss the challenges people face when trying to lose weight. During the exchange, one comment he made stood out.

“Even when they’ve tried to do it, they find the challenge insurmountable.”

However, the Minister for Health wasn’t talking about people’s struggle with smoking. Instead, he was making the case for the government’s proposed use of the fat loss drug Mounjaro, which he says could help get people’s weight down so they can return to work.

A detailed depiction of a meeting in an NHS room with people discussing weight loss drugs and vaping.

During the interview, Streeting made it clear that he didn’t think that medicating the public was the sole answer to obesity. However, he also underlined his excitement about evidence suggesting that “jabs combined with changes to diet and exercise can help people to reduce their weight, but also prevent cardiovascular disease and diabetes, which is game changing.”

Then, he went on to suggest that “if we can throw the trends we see in obesity into reverse, that’s better for the health of the nation, it’s also better for the nation’s finances because we’ve got to shift from treating sickness to actively preventing it.”

Whatever you might think about Mounjaro or similar drugs’ ability to actually get people back to work, Streeting’s stance is relatively coherent: the government should fund and encourage preventative health interventions that benefit the NHS, the economy, and UK citizens.

The cost

Organisations such as the WHO, CDC, and NIH classify obesity as a chronic disease. However, on these shores, groups like the NHS, RSPH, and the PHE see it as more of a public health problem.

What we can agree on is that obesity is a predictor for a wide range of health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Recent estimates suggest obesity costs the NHS £6.5 billion each year, with some reports suggesting the condition costs the UK economy around £58 billion per annum.

Comparative figures suggest that smoking costs the NHS £2.6 billion, with broader costs to the economy of around £22 billion. Although it is worth noting that both these figures are highly contentious and are created in an entirely unscientific manner in order to get an answer that the “researcher” wants rather than find the truth. However, they are the figures the Government uses, so it is only right to throw the cost savings back at them.

Based on his Mounjaro statements, we can infer what Streeting would do if there were a product that could:

  • Reduce cancer, diabetes 2, and heart disease.
  • Improve the nation’s finances.
  • Reduce pressure on the NHS.
  • Help move healthcare toward a more preventative kind of model.

So surely the same logic should apply to vapes and pouches.

Weighing up the risks

While the benefits of vaping and pouches are obvious to the NHS, the public conversation doesn’t reflect this reality. In fact, many doctors and health bodies caution against these products because they say we don’t know enough about the long-term risks. However, potential risks haven’t stopped Streeting from pursuing Mounjaro.

In recent days, a number of reports and a paper released by the Jama Network suggested that Ozempic and Mounjaro users have had vision problems. Some people who have taken these weight loss drugs have even gone temporarily blind. Furthermore, in November, the use of prescribed Mounjaro was recorded as a contributing factor in the death of a nurse.

While many suggest these cases are uncommon and the damage is reversed once people come off the drug, there is no vaping equivalent to these side effects. Mounjaro underwent two years of clinical trials before being made public. Vaping has been around for almost 20 years, and despite the concerted effort of tobacco control, the big health stories that involved vapes, like popcorn lung and EVALI, have been totally debunked.

Final thoughts

All products carry some level of risk. However, these risks must be put in context with their potential gains. If Streeting seems comfortable with Mounjaro, despite its potential for complications among some members of the public, then he should be able to apply that line of thinking to vapes and pouches.

Pockets of the NHS are already giving out vapes or incentivising the public to quit cigarettes. However, the success of these products doesn’t hinge on fiscal support from the government; they just need to get out of the way and reap the benefits.