Big Pharma Is Fooling You Again, and You Don't Even Know It
What this video covers
A Tucker Carlson interview with Calley Means, the Truemed co-founder and former pharmaceutical-industry consultant, centered on Ozempic. Means argues the weight-loss drug is a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding corruption across healthcare — in the food system that makes people sick, in the drug’s own risk profile as he presents it, and in the industry money flowing to doctors, medical groups, and civil-rights organizations. He closes with policy proposals and announces Good Energy, the book he helped his sister, Dr. Casey Means, write.
Key points
- Means’ central metaphor: “If a fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank — you don’t drug the fish.” He argues obesity is not an “Ozempic deficiency” but one branch of underlying metabolic dysfunction, citing figures of 50% of teens and 80% of adults overweight and more than 50% of Americans with prediabetes.
- He says more than $10 billion a year flows from the federal treasury to soda companies through food stamps, that soda is the number-one item purchased with SNAP, and that the US is the only country that allows it.
- Means says that when he consulted for Coca-Cola, “we paid the NAACP and other groups to say it was racist” to restrict soda — and alleges Novo Nordisk now funds the NAACP, which he notes is a registered lobbyist for the drugmaker and frames federal Ozempic funding as a civil-rights issue.
- On the drug itself, Means cites a price of roughly $20,000 per patient per year as a lifetime treatment, says about 30% of patients stop within three months amid gastrointestinal side effects and lawsuits, and notes an EU probe into reports of suicidal ideation. He also notes Novo Nordisk had become Europe’s most valuable company while the drug is not first-line obesity treatment in Europe.
- He criticizes the American Academy of Pediatrics for recommending the drug as first-line treatment for teens based on what he describes as a 68-week study.
- Means alleges Novo Nordisk has given “$30 million in direct bribes to obesity doctors” through consulting payments, and argues conflicts of interest are pervasive in NIH-funded research — the same playbook, he says, as the opioid crisis.
- He argues pharmaceutical TV ads exist to “buy off the news” rather than reach consumers, and proposes that a president could ban pharma ads on TV news, bar NIH grants to conflicted researchers, and change food subsidies.
- Means describes himself as a libertarian who believes people should be able to take Ozempic — his objection, he says, is to the publicly funded push to make it the default answer to obesity instead of food, exercise, and doctors prescribing lifestyle interventions through tax-advantaged dollars via companies like his own Truemed.