The Government has decided that the answer to the growing obesity of its two-legged livestock is to inject slimming drugs on demand. If current proposals go ahead, these will soon be available over the counter at high-street pharmacies, as casually as cough syrup. Nothing says “public health revolution” like giving the morbidly obese access to prescription needles without requiring them to lift a finger—or anything else.

The drug in question is semaglutide, sold under names like Ozempic and Wegovy. It mimics a hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar and, most importantly, makes you feel full. Weekly injections can lead to serious weight loss, but only if you also stop eating like a paper shredder and move more than once a day.

And it’s the only if and the otherwise that are the catch. The idea that something—anything—might reduce the number of waddling stink-bombs polluting my school corridors is appealing. If I never again have to sit next to a 16-stone teenager whose lunchbox is stuffed with four pastries and an amphora of chocolate milk, I’ll consider the drug a gift from the gods. But I’m not holding my breath, because the catch is this: these drugs are only effective if used alongside a healthy lifestyle; and the average British fatboy has no intention of changing his ways. He will take the jab, but will also keep scoffing Greggs and blame the bathroom scales for weightism. The only real difference is that now, his degeneracy will come with side effects—lots of them.

Let’s start with the common ones:

• Nausea, so constant you can’t eat (a win, in context)
• Vomiting, often severe
• Chronic diarrhoea, sometimes explosive
• Constipation, for variety
• Abdominal cramps, sometimes requiring hospitalisation
• Headaches, dizziness, and fatigue

And these are the advertised effects. The kind you get in the chirpy little leaflet nobody reads. The more interesting ones come buried in post-market surveillance and lawsuits:

• Pancreatitis—your pancreas starts digesting itself. Quite painful. Occasionally fatal.
• Gallstones—likely if you lose weight too fast. Also painful. Also possibly fatal.
• Acute kidney injury—especially if the vomiting and diarrhoea leave you dehydrated.
• Suicidal ideation—yes, the miracle cure for low self-esteem sometimes encourages people to jump off bridges.
• Thyroid cancer—in rats, but nobody’s ruling it out in humans.
• Muscle loss—because when the fat goes, so does the strength, leaving you saggy and skeletal.
• Weight rebound—most users pile the pounds back on when they stop taking the drug. So they don’t stop, which suits the manufacturers very nicely.

This isn’t medicine. It’s maintenance. You’re not curing obesity. You’re leasing it, at £73 per week per patient, indefinitely.

And this brings me to the real point. This isn’t a public health initiative. It’s not a noble effort to help people slim down. It’s a transfer scheme—from the taxpayer’s pocket to the pharmaceutical industry. You pay the bill. The fatboys get the needles. And Novo Nordisk, the Danish company behind semaglutide, gets billions. Their market capitalisation has ballooned into the trillions.

How? Not by producing miracle cures, but by paying an army of “public affairs consultants”—read: sordid hacks in pinstripe suits with frayed and sweaty crotches—to creep about Whitehall and Parliament with one clear message: “Give us money and we’ll fix the fatties.” Ministers, keen for anything that looks like a solution, nod along. NHS bureaucrats draw up “frameworks.” The media does its part: stories of sad-looking women who’ve “tried everything” but only lost weight when injected with lab-made hormones. No mention of the cream cakes or the buggered joints.

And so the circus rolls on. A collapsing health service spends what little it has left on monthly injections for people who won’t stop eating crap. MPs get their bribes. Consultants get their cut. Big Pharma gets richer. The only real losers are the taxpayers—and who cares about them?

All this being said, I’m presently in favour. If even a small fraction of these wretched creatures experience the more “serious” side effects, the total number of the obese might go down. It will be a better misuse of the taxpayers’ money than most I’ve seen. When you have to share a classroom day after day with the dysgenic refuse of a dying nation—the sweat, the smell, the snoring in lessons, the endless excuses—you earn the right to a certain hardness of heart. These people have been gorging themselves into triple-XL uniforms since Year 7: a little thyroid cancer might be the first productive thing their bodies have done in years.

So let them all be jabbed, I say. And if the side effects do half of what the early data suggests, there may be less of the dysgenic refuse around next term.

One can hope.