Terry Prone: Fatten up the tax receipts with production of weight-loss drug

Producing the weight-loss drug Ozempic in Ireland could boost corporate tax revenue from Big Pharma. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty

It is time for advance factories and a new acronym, as if we didn’t have enough of the latter. We’ll come to the acronym. But first (as they irritatingly say, way too often, on radio) the advance factories. There’s a hand up at the back. Yes? You’ve never heard of an advance factory, Emma? Of course, at your age, you wouldn’t have. Forgive me.

An advance factory was — and sometimes still is — a construction by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), invented maybe 50 years ago. They’d buy up land around the country and stick these huge empty buildings on the sites chosen, landscaping the surroundings so the whole thing became a posh pre-ghost industrial estate.

Then the IDA lads would slip into their mohair suits, grab their briefcases and go cold-calling on American industrialists. Sometimes they would cold-call on industrialists in other nations, but America was the favourite, because even a little research would tend to reveal that Chuck Whoever, the president of Gidgets, Inc, had an Irish grandmother or was a first cousin once removed to some Irish person.

Chuck Whoever could be reached and persuaded to have a cuppa with a charming Irishman. (Look, this was in the days when research took time because Google hadn’t been conceived, never mind born, and when women in Ireland were entering third level, not yet entering the IDA ranks.) Chuck would be helped to realise that Ireland was the place to make his next generation of widgets. Cue slide show of 40 shades of green scenery, the aerial footage homing in on a pristine building. This, he would be told, was an advance factory.

A what? An advance factory. Built to the highest standards in the middle of nowhere — ooops, let’s take that again. Built to the highest standards three minutes from a major road leading to Shannon airport. All Chuck would have to do would be to install his assembly lines inside this smashing ready-to-wear factory, greatly assisted by Irish State grants, and, sure, the locals would be knocking on the doors to get jobs because Ireland didn’t have any — ooops, because Ireland had such a happy, educated population who would like to stay home. 

Not to mention the state grants to help Chuck employ those native Irish lads and lassies. All of which added up to a fairly appealing proposition for Chuck. 

The advance factory was a few months away from operational capacity, and was replicated all over the country. Local authorities were egging to co-operate with the IDA on this one, and local politicians got their photographs taken twice: once when the advance factory was completed, and later when the overseas industrialists opened for business.

We have to hope that the foreign direct investment guys currently have lots of advance factories up their sleeves (pardon the mixed metaphor), because the word is that NovoNordisk and all the other pharma companies that own a product that promises to make the taker lose weight, are scouring the world looking for places in which to make Ozempic, Wegovy, or their near-relatives.

Chance to repurpose 

Of course, some observers would glumly note that several actual pharmaceutical factories in this country, with actual and expert workers, are currently under threat because the fear of covid has reduced so much.

We’re not quite at the stage where we’re prepared to substitute a hair dryer pointed up our nose, Boris Johnson-fashion, for a quick stick of the latest vaccine, but a kind of boredom has set in, like we’re done with covid.

It has to be said that this boredom is rare among the over 60s, who have been remarkably willing, this autumn, to have their GP nurse or pharmacist stick a needle in each arm to protect them against flu (left) and covid (right) even if it means they’re unsafe to lift a tray for the rest of the week because of the effect on their muscles.

The wise and fearful older generation may want vaccines, but the demand in other age cohorts has diminished, which has created a kind of double-wave of fear. The first wave is among the employees in companies making the product. The second is in economists looking at Ireland’s huge tax take from Big Pharma. 

You know, the big tax take that allowed the Government to deliver a giveaway budget that made absolutely nobody any happier? That budget. The big fear, covered in this weekend’s mainstream media, is that this tax take, already on the slide, could diminish catastrophically in the coming quarters.

If you add the economic situation to the Ozempic situation (not exactly apples and oranges, but you get the drift) it looks as if in the next few years, Ireland is going to be markedly thinner and poorer. Back to the days portrayed in those ancient photographs they keep adding colour to but with mobile phones. On the other hand, those vaccine factories could be speedily re-purposed for Ozempic/Wegovy production, and advance factories around the country, of which we hear there are a few, with some under construction, could attract this business, no bother.

Which brings us to the need for a new acronym. BFOO — Best Friend On Ozempic. Every one has at least one, and — depending on the wealth level — many people in Ireland have several. 

They serve as walking, talking case studies, moving the ingestion issue down from the level of the Kardashians to the level of the school gate or water cooler. Remarkably open, many of them are. One pal responded to questions with a displeasingly detailed account of the early nausea associated with her prescription. She had probably eaten more healthy food before she was put on the drug, she added, just in rather higher volumes than was useful.

The drug, interestingly, is so comprehensive in its squelching of food desires that she has less interest in the preparation of “good” meals than she used to. On the other hand, three stone down, she is more confident of being alive when her kids emerge from school, which was her objective. And the three stone is approximate. Regular weighing is one of the sad obsessional behaviours the drug has quelled.

Another friend said she wouldn’t go into detail, but the constipation was epic. A third wanted to smite Oprah for that statement she put out to the effect that losing weight through these new drugs was doing it the easy way. Much the same line as Dr Eva advances. The friend, who was first put on Ozempic for diabetes and for whom the weight loss was a blissful side-effect, wants to know how someone as intelligent as Oprah can be so thick when it comes to appetite management. Here’s a woman, he points out, who has spent most of her adult life publicly losing and gaining weight, which is rotten for overall health, plus being painful and in Oprah’s case, frequently counter-productive.

Wherein, my BFOO wants to know, lies the virtue in that?