Wegovy’s Obesity Drug Prevents COVID Deaths, Study Suggests

Wegovy, a popular obesity drug, may have another surprising benefit. A huge clinical trial found that people taking the drug during the pandemic died less often from Covid-19– researchers reported on Friday.

People taking Wegovy still got COVID-19, at the same rate as those randomly assigned to a placebo. But their chances of dying from the infection dropped by 33 percent, the study found. And the protective effect happened immediately — before the participants had lost a significant amount of weight.

In addition, the rate of death from all causes was lower among those taking Wegovy, a very uncommon finding in clinical trials of novel treatments. The result suggests that the lower life expectancy among people with obesity is actually due to the disease itself and that it can be improved by treating the obesity.

“Stunning,” wrote Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. editorial accompanying the studysaid of the data. The study was published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The study was not originally designed to examine the effects of Wegovy in people with COVID-19. But participants taking the drug were no healthier than those not taking it, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a Yale cardiologist and the journal’s editor-in-chief.

“This is a randomized trial and the infection rates were similar, so this is the highest quality evidence,” he said.

The discovery came after researchers seized an unprecedented opportunity to ask a question they never anticipated, said Dr. Benjamin Scirica, a study investigator and cardiologist and senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Would Wegovy have any impact on Covid infections? “I don’t think any of us expected it to have an impact on the drug,” he said.

With the outbreak of the Covid epidemic large clinical trial of Wegovy, sponsored by its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, was already underway. The goal was to see if the drug prevented deaths from heart disease and health events such as heart attacks.

The study involved 17,604 people who had heart disease and an average body mass index (BMI) of 27 or higher. They did not have diabetes. They were followed for more than three years.

But the pandemic has complicated matters. The study participants were among those most at risk of death or severe illness from Covid because they had both obesity and heart disease.

The first challenge was simply keeping the research going during lockdowns and social distancing. “We had to make drastic changes to make sure the study would continue and the people in the study would continue to receive their medication,” Dr. Scirica said.

Some researchers drove to the meeting site, left a bag of medications, and walked away to observe the participant coming to pick it up, so the meeting could be conducted in a contactless manner.

Scientists changed their data collection forms to record Covid infections and, as vaccines became available, vaccinations. They began recording whether a death was related to Covid.

A total of 4,258 participants contracted COVID-19, almost equally between those who took Wegovy and those who took a placebo. Of those patients, 184 died — 78 in those assigned to Wegovy and 106 in those assigned to placebo, a significant difference.

The obesity drug also reduced the overall death rate by 19 percent, researchers reported. Although obese people are known to have a shortened lifespan, this is the first demanding study to show that treating obesity alone helps people live longer.

“Most of our studies in the cardiovascular world—with statins or other cardiovascular drugs—have a pretty good effect on cardiovascular deaths but no effect on noncardiovascular deaths,” he said. They were huge studies with hundreds of thousands of patients.

Dr. Faust said he was shocked by the effect on overall mortality. “All the hype we hear about these different pharmaceutical drugs is exactly that — hype,” he said. “But these drugs have been shown repeatedly and routinely to be game changers.”

Because the median age of patients was 61, the decline in all-cause deaths “means that even if it turns out in 30 years that there are some risks that we don’t know about yet, those will have a demanding road to go to outweigh the benefits in terms of saving years or decades of life,” Dr. Faust added.

He noted that the class of drugs to which Wegovy belongs has been studied in patients for 10 to 15 years, “so it’s not some therapy that we’ve been using for a year or two.”

But why do Wegovy and other so-called GLP-1 agonists have such an effect? ​​“It’s more than just weight loss,” said Dr. David Maron, a Stanford cardiologist and director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

Dr. Faust believes these drugs improve overall health, including by reducing chronic inflammation.

When a juvenile, robust person gets the flu, he said, “it will cost them a week of work and suffering.” But the situation is different if the person is in a nursing home. Then the flu infection can be deadly. Organs can fail as the body shifts resources to fight the infection.

Could Wegovy and similar drugs also protect people from dying from other infectious diseases, such as influenza or RSV? Dr. Faust and Dr. Maron now believe that this is possible.

Dr. Scirica wants to go back and look at other studies of GLP-1 drugs to see if they have an effect on infectious diseases. He said that in novel studies, researchers should be intentional about looking for such data.

“I expect to be surprised,” said Jon Zelner, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, “given what has been found so far in studies of novel obesity drugs.