Senate health committee chair Bernie Sanders has called a vote to subpoena the chief of Novo Nordisk’s U.S. division over the company’s pricing of Ozempic and Wegovy.
Sanders successfully ran a similar playbook on executives from Merck and Johnson & Johnson earlier this year. Under the threat of subpoena, the company CEOs agreed to testify at a hearing on why companies charge more for medicines in the United States than abroad before the subpoena vote actually happened.
This move is the latest maneuver in Sanders’ boldest pressure campaign yet to browbeat companies into lowering patients’ drug costs. Unlike other targets of Sanders’ ire that were drugs based on decades-old technology or developed in part with federal funding, Novo’s weight loss medicines in particular are innovative, effective, and wildly popular.
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