Weight-loss drug Wegovy starts at ₹17,345 in India
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Mumbai: Wegovy (semaglutide), the popular weight-loss drug from Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk , is priced between Rs 17,345 and Rs 26,015 across dosages in India. The company announced at its launch that the easy-to-administer once-a-weekly pen-filled injectable will have the advantage of convenient dosing.The drug will be available in five dosing strengths (0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.7 and 2.4 mg) and will be prescribed for long-term chronic weight management and reduction in risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE).Vikrant Shrotriya, MD, Novo Nordisk India, said obesity is a chronic disease and a national epidemic. "Wegovy is a transformative therapeutic solution with the convenience of a world-class, state-of-the-art pen device," he noted.Ambrish Mithal, chairman and head, endocrinology and diabetes, Max Healthcare , said although the price of Wegovy is not within the reach of the Indian masses, the potential for the drug is huge.Over time, he said, the cardiovascular benefit of Wegovy 2.4 mg is an important addition to the weight loss benefits. It is clinically proven to reduce cardiac events by 20%, both in people suffering from overweight/obesity with pre-existing heart disease.The drug can be prescribed for patients with BMI over 30 and those with BMI above 27 and pre-existing co-morbidities.Bariatric surgeon Mufazzal Lakdawala told ET that weight-loss drugs are proving to be the game-changers and they have just unlocked the potential for obese patients. He said the new age weight loss drugs could potentially complement bariatric surgery for patients beyond BMI of 45-50 as a weight-loss option.Compared to Wegovy, Mounjaro's 2.5 mg and 5 mg vials, which are also given on a weekly basis, are priced at Rs 14,000 to Rs 17,500 for a month's dose.
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To do so would be to ignore the layers of history, class, caste, gender, and geography that shape how people engage with health interventions. India's vaccination strategy during the COVID pandemic, though massive in scale, often reinforced these fractures. Communication was top-down and overly technical. When resistance appeared, it was often dismissed as ignorance. But resistance is a form of engagement too. The refusal to vaccinate is not always the absence of reason. Sometimes, it is reason asserting itself against a system that does not listen. Today, as COVID cases rise and fall, we are confronted with the aftershocks of this fatigue. Experts may issue fresh advisories. But the ground has already shifted. We must ask ourselves: What does it mean to call someone 'hesitant'? In a country where 'awareness campaigns' have often meant megaphones without conversation, it is perhaps not surprising that people tune out. To face the next phase of the pandemic, we need more than doses and dashboards. We need humility. We need to ask different questions. And we need to recognise that the crisis of vaccine hesitancy is not about the public refusing science – it is about science forgetting the public. It is also equally important to pause, assert, and reflect here on the fact that the rise in disinformation and misinformation has led to a genuine rise of anti-vax and vaccine hesitant sentiments which do not necessarily emerge from similar concerns or socio-political imaginaries. They are not always about a shared sense of history where such people suffered at the hands of the state or were systematically excluded by the state in governance affairs. These people or groups may very well have ulterior motives. Motives with a particular agenda in mind, a particular politics in mind, and a particular world order they wish to see. These, too, are merely symptoms of a dysfunctional state-science-public combine. The new publics of vaccination: between contestation and care There is a tendency in public discourse to reduce the conversation around vaccines to a binary: those who comply and those who don't. But the story unfolding today, in India and globally, is far messier. We are not facing a simple insurrection against science. What we are witnessing is the emergence of new publics: fragmented, critical, deeply shaped by lived experiences, and incredibly potent. These are publics that are not necessarily 'anti-vaccine,' but are certainly no longer content to be passive recipients of scientific authority. For decades, vaccination campaigns in India have relied on a model of outreach that prioritises scale over dialogue. The language is often about "coverage," "target populations," and "herd immunity." Missing from this vocabulary is a more humane, dialogic notion of care – one that sees people not as bodies to be immunised but as citizens to be engaged. The post-COVID moment exposes the limits of that model. This is where the idea of 'epistemic justice' becomes vital. Who gets to define what counts as valid knowledge? Who gets to speak in the name of science? And who is expected to listen unquestioningly? In much of the global pandemic response, science was wielded not as a space of inquiry but as a mandate. The public was not asked to participate in science; it was told to comply with it. The irony is that the state and the scientific community have often treated this resistance as noise. It has treated it as something to be countered through 'awareness' or 'influencer campaigns.' But this noise tells us where the fault lines lie. It tells us which groups feel abandoned, unheard, or coerced. It tells us what science must confront if it wishes to be democratic. In India, this moment is especially urgent. The country is grappling with overlapping crises, economic stress, social polarisation, environmental degradation, all of which intersect with health. Vaccination cannot be isolated from these realities. The challenge, then, is not just to fight misinformation, but to rebuild relationships. Relationships between the public and the state, between communities and health workers, between science and society. This cannot be done through press releases or public service ads alone. It requires deep, long-term engagement. It requires listening. One promising direction is the revival of community health workers as key intermediaries. ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), anganwadi workers, and local medical staff often possess a kind of grounded trust that national campaigns lack. Their knowledge of local languages, social dynamics, and histories of care positions them uniquely to bridge the gap between biomedical authority and community experience. But for this to work, they must be empowered, not just as deliverers of state policy but as co-creators of public health discourse. Trust The future of vaccination does not lie in forcing consensus. It lies in recognising pluralism. It lies in accepting that doubt is not the enemy of science, but its companion. It lies in understanding that publics are not obstacles to be overcome, but interlocutors to be engaged. And most importantly, it lies in acknowledging that trust cannot simply be restored by demanding obedience. It must be earned through accountability, humility, and care. The question before us is not merely: 'How do we get people to take the vaccine?' The better question might be: 'What kind of scientific culture do we need to ensure people want to?' The real story of any pandemic is shaped by how deeply we choose to listen – to fear, to fatigue, to resistance, and to the complicated publics. The booster campaign that flounders, the parent who hesitates, the worker who demands more. These are not failures of science, but symptoms of a deeper rupture: a loss of dialogue. We cannot vaccinate our way out of a trust crisis. Nor can we flatten public health into dashboards and coverage stats while pretending the politics has vanished. If anything, the politics has returned with a vengeance. What is needed is not just another wave of advisories. It is a rethinking of what public health means in a democracy. It is time to stop treating publics as obstacles to be managed and start recognising them as co-authors of our collective health futures. Because when the next surge comes, and it will, the real question won't be 'Do they believe in science?' but 'Does science still believe in them?'. Rishabh Kachroo is a Ph.D. scholar at Shiv Nadar IoE deemed to be University. X: The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
