You know that GLP-1s aren't new, right? There are diabetics who have been on them continuously for decades; it's only the realization that they can treat obesity which is new. If there were common and severe side-effects from continuous long-term use, they'd already have shown up in diabetic patients.

yes. everyone knows chemotherapy agents are going to be bad, and that they can’t be continued forever etc, and yet the long-term prognosis is absolutely clear as to what happens if you don’t take them.

drugs don’t need to be used long-term to have a pretty good picture of the long-term tradeoffs, particularly when it’s something like cancer or obesity that has a clearly negative long-term outcome in the a sense of a successful intervention. Most interventions for obesity are ultimately not successful and to have one that is is a game changer, even if it has some minor side effects (and burden of proof cuts both ways - it’s not clear that they even exist etc, only that it would still be worth it if they did).

in the real world, things usually don’t turn out to have some stealth side effect that takes 30 years to manifest, and nobody is telling you to take them anyway, just to stop injecting yourself into private medical decisions around an approved, well-studied drug with a seemingly quite benign profile.

(why oh why do I suspect that semaglutide skepticism correlates heavily with the “respect my freedom to not wear a mask” crowd…)

liraglutide was developed in 1998 by Novo Nordisk. define short term.

It has been pretty heavily researched since the 90s.