Stephen Fry thought things were too good to be true. Having spoken to his US-based doctor in 2019 about a new drug that promised to help him lose weight by reducing his appetite, the nation’s favourite public intellectual thought he’d give it a go. “The first week or so, I was thinking, ‘This is astonishing,'” he told the podcast Ruthie’s Table 4 earlier this year. “‘Not only do I not want to eat, I don’t want any alcohol of any kind. This is going to be brilliant.'” However, within a week of trying the injection-based drug, Fry started to feel some unpleasant side effects. “I started feeling sick, and I started getting sicker and sicker and sicker,” he said. “I was literally throwing up four, five times a day and I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ So that’s it.” Fry soon came to the conclusion that even a miraculous loss of weight was not worth the constant nausea that the drug in question, called Ozempic – generic name ‘Semaglutide’ – was leaving him feeling, and he soon stopped taking it. Five years on, however, and Fry’s prompt abandonment and vicious bouts of vomiting has not stopped the Novo Nordisk-made...