In this article, we will be looking at how profit-seeking businesses push modern technologies and innovations onto the masses as “miracle solutions,” only for their devastating consequences to be uncovered years or decades later. However, by the time this information has come light, these supposed technological miracles would have already become highly ingrained within society, and it becomes almost impossible to discard them completely. And to understand this effect, we will be looking at the specific example of Ozempic, the drug that is being marketed as the miracle cure for obesity. People are flocking to get themselves injected with it without any regard whatsoever for what the long-term consequences may be.

The active ingredient in Ozempic is semaglutide, a chemical that is also known as a GLP-1 agonist. This chemical mimics GLP-1, a naturally occurring hormone in the human body. It was used mainly to manage type 2 diabetes due to its ability to regulate blood sugar levels. However, due to its additional effect of suppressing the subject’s appetite, people have found a new use for it: losing weight. Using this and similar drugs, people have been able to lose a significant amount of weight in just a few short months, with many having documented this newfound success of theirs online.

The Ozempic trend spread like wildfire, with everyone from popular celebrities to famous politicians jumping on the bandwagon to start using it. However, as we’ll see a little later on, it’s possible that these famous individuals might actually be receiving financial incentives in order to promote this “miracle drug.” People have become so completely blinded by the effectiveness of Ozempic when it comes to weight loss, such that they’re completely disregarding the downsides of it which are already known, as well as any potential future risks.

How Big Pharma Pays Doctors to Do Their Dirty Work

Novo Nordisk, the company that produces Ozempic, raked in €16.1 billion by selling Ozempic and €7.8 billion Euros by selling Wegovy, another drug that also contains semaglutide, with 2024 having been a record-breaking year for the company. But how did Novo Nordisk achieve this huge level of success? How was it able to convince millions of people that its medicines are some sort of miracle cures and that they are worth making such extremely expensive purchases on a regular basis?

You see, Novo Nordisk, just like every other major pharmaceutical company and most major modern corporations, is nothing but a profit-seeking business whose ultimate goal is to advertise aggressively and convince their customers to become forever hooked on their products, thus converting them into money-making chumps without a care for the devastating effects that their products may have on them or society as a whole. The only thing that really matters is money.

And in order to convince the public that they must buy Ozempic, Novo Nordisk spent a staggering $25.8 million in buying off medical experts and obesity specialists, turning them into propaganda machines and having them promote and push Ozempic onto the unsuspecting masses. This tactic of using experts, scientists, and celebrities to push your dirty propaganda is an age old tactic used by both businesses and governments alike, and it is quite effective. Why? Because people naturally tend to place their trust in those they deem as authorities in a given field, and modern societies have somehow convinced us that medical “experts” and doctors are to be taken as unquestionable authorities when it comes to the matter of our health, as if they aren’t flawed human beings like the rest of us, with their own personal biases and desires.

RELATED: Vaccines Under the Microscope: A Muslim Doctor’s Perspective

Yes, experts do usually know a great deal more regarding the subjects they specialize in. However, the more money that is being funneled into their pockets by big corporations, the less we can trust the words that come out of their mouths. This is because all of that money becomes a filter that takes root within their throats—a filter that allows only what is beneficial for these corporations to pass through it and never anything that might hurt them financially. Such experts, journalists, scientists, celebrities, and sometimes even religious scholars are clearly compromised due to the corrupt agendas of their financial beneficiaries and their loyalty to them.

For instance, in the case of Ozempic, which we are currently examining, the example of Dr. Lee Kaplan illustrates this perfectly:

Kaplan, the chief of obesity medicine at Dartmouth College’s medical school, is a powerful standard bearer for Novo’s case. Until last year, the 69-year-old gastroenterologist led the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital and taught at Harvard Medical School. He’s also a highly paid messenger: Novo has spent $1.4 million on Kaplan for consulting work and travel between 2013 and 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of federal data.

This is how these corporations make medical experts compromise on their values and expertise and instead willingly sing along to their tune. Whether it be to push heart-attack-inducing vaccines or suspiciously fast-acting weight-loss drugs, these companies see corruptible medical experts as a gateway to the public, with their mouths being the Trojan horse required to plant the seeds of becoming loyal customers into the minds of millions. And one of the main metrics of success in this business is how shameless the executives running these companies are.

Now, is shamelessly buying off famous figures to push propaganda legal? Yes, and these Big Pharma corporations know exactly how to do this and get away with it. For example, only a fraction of the money that Novo gave to Kaplan was explicitly related to their drugs:

The money Novo reported paying Kaplan, for instance, included just $262,038 that the company classified as directly related to the two drugs, and $131,624 for an older diabetes medicine with the same active ingredient as Saxenda. Novo paid Kaplan $976,019 more without specifying any drug. Experts who study these industry payments say drugmakers have latitude on how to classify their spending on doctors.

Novo paid Kaplan $1.2 million in consulting fees. Let that sink in. Can someone really believe, even for a brief moment, that Novo really paid this doctor over a million dollars just for his wise consultations? These companies have entire legal teams that know exactly how to make what they do appear completely legitimate, even when it’s basically bribing and paying experts to be their propaganda mouthpieces. Novo spent $150.95K on Kaplan’s luxury trips, only to then label this as being for innocent “travel and lodging.” Bestowing such luxurious trips upon their precious propaganda mouthpieces is quite a common occurrence for these companies:

Drugmaker spending on physicians for travel, speeches and consulting is a common but controversial practice in the United States, sparking criticism about conflicts of interest and compromised patient care.

 

“These highly-paid doctors end up drowning out the voices of people who aren’t being flown around to every medical meeting,” said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center who studies pharmaceutical marketing practices. “As a result, there’s not a lot of resistance to the prevailing industry-funded view.”

Together, this tag-team of powerful corporations and sell-out experts and academics make for an extremely lucrative business, at the expense of public health of course.

How Ozempic and Big Macs Are Similar in Nature

Drugs like Ozempic don’t address the underlying issues that cause obesity, i.e., a combination of a bad diet in the form of consuming highly processed sugary and seed-oil-infused junk foods with a sedentary lifestyle with little to no exercise. Both of these things contribute to promoting fat storage within the body and preventing fat loss, leading to obesity. The modern society that we live in is one that has induced in us a deep sense of comfort and complacency, which has led to extreme demotivation and aversion to hard work, i.e., a weakening of willpower.

In order to address the underlying issue of obesity, this weakened willpower must be strengthened. In this case, that would be by exercising the will to resist cravings, the temptation to eat food unrestrictedly, and the will to move your body around more and exercise. A journey like this involves transforming oneself into a better version of yourself, one that is not just physically but also mentally and spiritually stronger; one that has the ability to not fall back into the pit of obesity after having struggled so hard to climb out from it.

RELATED: The Genetic Pandora’s Box: Engineering a Dystopian Future

Drugs like Ozempic do the exact opposite of this. In no way do they strengthen a person’s willpower, instead making them rely entirely on the drug itself to not feel hungry and to lose weight passively, not just from fat loss but also muscle loss, physically weakening its users. And once the users have reached their target weight, they stop taking the drug, only to be met with the grim reality of the dependence they had built on this expensive “medication.”

Yes, that’s right, Ozempic users are infamously known to regain their weight after they stop using the drug:

One year after withdrawal of once‐weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2.4 mg and lifestyle intervention, participants regained two‐thirds of their prior weight loss, with similar changes in cardiometabolic variables.

This is because they themselves had developed no resistance to the modern food industry, so once the hunger-suppressing drug was no longer flowing through their body, they quite inevitably fell back into old habits, quickly undoing any progress they had made. And after having wasted so much money for nothing, it probably only served to demotivate them even further.

Drugs like Ozempic aren’t meant to be taken permanently, and if someone only takes it temporarily, the beneficial effects are very likely to end up being quickly reversed once the drug is dropped. Not to mention, it is extremely expensive in countries like the US. Ozempic doesn’t solve the problem of modernity, which causes obesity. Instead, it only adds to it even more by being yet another addictive product marketed by a powerful corporation, designed to steal people’s money away from them at the cost of their well-being. Think about it for a moment. Let’s objectively compare Ozempic with the Big Mac and see how similar the two are:

The Big Mac is an addictive product manufactured by a powerful corporation in order to produce loyal, weak-willed customers who are strongly dependent on the pleasure that the product provides, with the ultimate goal of making billions of dollars off of these consumers.

Ozempic is an addictive product manufactured by a powerful corporation in order to produce loyal, weak-willed customers who are strongly dependent on the pleasure that the product provides, with the ultimate goal of making billions of dollars off of the consumers.

Manufacturing the Problem to Sell the Solution

The truth is, the same corporations that are selling you the solution for obesity are complicit in also creating the problem of obesity. They are also part of the same modern consumerist industry that seeks only to gut people for their money, turning them into zombified slaves that are wholly dependent on them.

If these obesity specialists were really trying to solve the problem of obesity, they would be out on the streets protesting against Big Food and Big Pharma. They would be social activists trying their very best to expose the immense harm that the modern food industry is causing the human body to suffer. Instead, we get lunatics like certain “longevity experts” who claim that Coca Cola is healthier than natural dairy milk.

Unfortunately, the number of medical experts that are actually trying to address the real issues and raise their voices against these corrupt modern industries are few and far between. They are certainly not among those who receive millions in funding in exchange for spreading their message. Rather, such truth bearers often see these large amounts of money being used by the bearers of falsehood to bury and drown out their voices.

How Ozempic Disrupts the Body’s Natural Hormonal Balance

The Ozempic craze is relatively new. Nonetheless, there have already been a plethora of problems that have been uncovered regarding its frequent use. Some of these have even been given unofficial names by the public, such as the “Ozempic face,” which is when the loss of the natural fat padding in one’s face leads to a saggy unsightly look. This occurs as a result of the body losing dangerously excessive levels of fat, demonstrating yet another dark side to drugs like Ozempic.

Hunger is a natural God-given feeling, and it comes about as a result of an extremely well-balanced homeostatic flux of hormonal regulations. This balance is designed specifically to signal a nutritional deficit to your body, causing you to eat. If this signal is used to just restore the body to its natural balance and satiate the hunger, all is well and good. For instance, the stomach produces the hormone “ghrelin” when it is empty, signalling hunger. If there is enough fat in the body, another hormone called “leptin” creates a feeling of fullness. However, if you eat excessively over a prolonged period of time, the body develops a resistance to leptin, and excessive fat stores no longer restrict hunger. This is an abnormal state that obese individuals put themselves into, where they feel hungry despite having more than enough energy stored up in the form of fat.

What transpires is that a person disrupts their own hormonal regulations. For instance, in the case of the hormones that regulate hunger, the person switches these regulations from their natural orientation of providing the body with energy whenever it needs it, to providing the mind with pleasure whenever it wants.

RELATED: The Neuralink Nightmare: Medical Miracles, Superhumans, Brains in Vats

Now, some might say that this predilection to becoming obese is evidence that the human body is innately faulty. However, they would be wrong, since they have fundamentally misunderstood the intention behind the human body’s design. Humans weren’t designed to be perfect, period. They were designed to be tested, and this trial-based nature is reflected by hormones that elicit desire, such as the desire to eat excessively and unhealthily. And once again, the only correct way to combat this is to restore the body to its natural hormonal state by overcoming the test and learning to control one’s nafs (base desires).

On the opposite end of the “hunger spectrum” we have severe undereating, which is what Ozempic is designed to cause, and this too leads to poor health, being equally as distant from the body’s natural hormonal state as it is during obesity. Only, on this end, the hormonal regulators rarely or never elicit a feeling of hunger, thus never replenishing the body’s energy reserves. This leads to dangerous levels of fat and muscle loss. Both extremes are unhealthy and unnatural, and they will never lead to a truly healthy body.

And to top it all off, it is likely that Ozempic users will just rapidly regain all of the lost weight once they eventually give the drug up, going yet again from one extreme and unhealthy end of the hunger spectrum back to the other. This might induce a vicious cycle of constantly switching between modern food-industry-induced obesity and Ozempic-induced weakness, never attaining the natural balance that exists in the middle.

Ozempic and the Disruptive Technological Life Cycle

The Ozempic craze is setting up to follow a pretty consistent track record when it comes to popular technological “miracles.” This “technological life cycle” has repeated itself an exhaustingly high number of times already, and it consists of a technology being introduced to overcompensatingly solve a non-existent or modernity-induced problem. Only once it has been completely integrated into and normalized within society do the true devastating consequences of its usage become revealed, usually years or decades down the line, by which time it is already too late.

Cigarettes, tetraethyl lead, CFCs, road infrastructure, the Internet and social media, the Covid vaccine, plastic packaging, processed drinks, etc., are just a few examples that come to mind. People at the advent of these technologies didn’t know that they would cause serious problems like lung cancer, brain damage, holes in the ozone layer, widespread pollution, sudden heart attacks in athletes, toxic hormonal disruptions, widespread obesity, etc.

This is just a miniscule fraction from the practically endless list of technologies that were marketed by money-hungry corporations as miracles of progress, only to later turn out to be extremely harmful for mankind. Why should Ozempic be any different? There is very little doubt in my mind that various seriously detrimental effects of Ozempic will be uncovered later on down the line and that these revelations will make those who used it so rashly, without so much as a second’s thought, extremely regretful of their choices.

RELATED: Liberal Hedonism vs Islamic Fulfillment: The True Measure of Pain and Pleasure

But why are modern technologies so destructive? Why do most of them end up being so harmful, especially towards the human body, which they’re designed specifically to serve. Well, the reason may lie in the fact that a lot of them are designed to severely disrupt the natural order of things, be it within the human body or on a societal scale. For instance, cars and road infrastructure greatly transformed the way that humans lived, as did the Internet and social media. They have also had severe transformative effects on the human body, just like plastics, cigarettes, and highly processed foods. It’s naïve to subject mankind to such transformative changes which disrupt the natural balance that had been maintained for thousands of years and to then not expect there to be severely disruptive and detrimental consequences as a result. This is the ultimate cost of messing with the natural order of things that Allah has created everything in.

This world was created as a test. It has been filled with sufficient bounties and resources for mankind. There were basic natural ways of operating societies on both the rural and the urban levels, those that followed timeless dynamics and boundaries. Finally, through Allah’s instructions, brought to us via his blessed Prophets (peace be upon them all), we learned the best and correct way to utilize and manage these bountiful resources and social dynamics. This was more than enough for humans to live and thrive on. One of humanity’s greatest mistakes was being ungrateful to Allah by asserting that this was not enough and attempting to fix something that wasn’t broken.

As a result, we developed needless technologies for our convenience and comfort, with a tendency for corrupt wealthy elites to mass produce and push these technologies worldwide. This has led to such disruptively transformative effects to humanity that we are still attempting to understand just how deep the problem goes, along with just how unnatural as humans we’ve become, straying ever further away from God and the truth with every new step we take towards the lie of a problem-less technological utopia.

An Important Lesson for Muslim Experts

Muslims who specialize and excel in various academic fields must learn an important lesson from examples such as these. Many of these fields, especially the medical field, are meant to be about helping humanity. However, in order to do this, it is necessary to understand the global dynamics at play, about the corrupt nature of modern industries like Big Pharma and how they are attempting to destroy mankind in the name of helping them. We simply cannot remain complacent and naïve.

It is also important to understand that in our modern world, there are two groups of “experts” that exist. One group knowingly or unknowingly serves the interests of these corporate shayatin (devils) who cloak their evil profit-based agendas in the lie of helping humanity. Those who do it unknowingly are too dense to see through the blatant lies of these corporate shayatin, naively thinking that they are serving a noble cause, and those who do it knowingly are smart enough to understand what’s going on but decide to sell their souls and join in on the money-making schemes alongside these corporate shayatin.

This leaves the second group, which are a fractional minority. They are smart enough to understand what’s going on, have the honour and integrity to not sell their souls, and possess the fortitude to speak out against the evils being committed in the name of helping humanity. This small group speaks the truth in the face of a great injustice, undeterred by the threat of losing their careers, their freedoms, and sometimes even their lives. However, despite this noble endeavour, they are often also the subject of public scrutiny, since the truth that they see clear as day runs contrary to the false propaganda that big corporations have fed the masses.

These individuals could be said to be engaging in a form of al-Amr bi ‘l-Ma’ruf wa ‘l-Nahy ‘ani ‘l-Munkar, i.e., enjoining good and forbidding evil. This is one of the core principles of Islam that every Muslim should work to espouse and undertake to the best of their capabilities, especially those who have been given knowledge and are experts in certain subjects. Whichever field they belong to, it is their moral duty to try and expose the injustices and evils being committed in that field.

Take heed of the following prophetic narration:

It has been narrated from Tariq ibn Shihab (may Allah be pleased with him) that a man asked the Prophet ﷺ as he had placed his leg within the stirrup: “Which is the best form of Jihad?” He ﷺ said: “The utterance of truth in the presence of an unjust ruler.” (Sunan al-Nasa’i: 4209)

Unfortunately, these powerful corporations exert their control over much of the world today, which they have purchased with their dirty money. Many of these executives wield strong influence over and control many politicians and high-ranking government officials. Furthermore, many politicians and government officials are shareholders in such corrupt large companies and industries.

It might be an uphill battle, but it’s high time that Muslim academics, experts, journalists, scientists, doctors, etc., assumed the spotlight when it comes to leading the way on this noble cause—to speak the truth despite the materialistic costs and to counter the greedy charlatans who don the badge of knowledge-bearers yet spread falsehood just so they can get a few all-expenses-paid trips to Paris, Hawaii, etc.

RELATED: The Neuralink Nightmare: The Transhumanist Elites’ Ultimate Mind Control Machine

muslimskeptic.com