Can a “miracle drug” change how we work?

**Akshara** (0:04)
In today's episode, we'll break down one interesting story in depth, followed by a shorter story. First, we'll talk about whether a miracle drug can change how we work. And then we'll talk about SEBI wanting to create a mutual fund distributor for bonds. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zeruda, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is 25th August. Coming to the first story.
So GLP once began as diabetes treatments, and then they became a breakthrough in weight loss. Now the promise is expanding again. Better health should mean people miss less work, stay productive, and remain economically active for longer. That last claim matters a lot. It's increasingly used to justify spending on these drugs, but until recently, nobody had tested it properly. And someone finally did. So their employment rate had not moved either. And if anything, the estimate leaned slightly negative, though it was statistically indistinguishable from zero. Now that finding comes from a July 2026 working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US.
Five economists used Danish administrative records to track what happened after people started taking Ozempic. The paper has not been peer-reviewed yet, but it's the most careful attempt so far to test whether these drugs improve people's working lives.
The answer is yes, just not in the way many expected. Now this matters to us because India is now running its own version of the experiment at speed and without a control group. Semiglutide's core compound patent in India lapsed in March 2026, and dozens of generic brands entered almost immediately, many at prices far below what the innovator had been charging. Sales spiked, then growth slowed sharply within a few months. Meanwhile, an estimated 10.5% of Indians aged 20 to 79 were living with diabetes in 2024, while roughly 8% of adults were obese. So the disease burden is huge, the drugs are suddenly much cheaper, and nobody in India is systematically measuring what any of this does to people's working lives. Denmark, thankfully, measures everything. Now, before getting to what the researchers found, there's one important question. How do we know ozempic actually caused any of it? That's harder to answer than it sounds, and if you simply line up ozempic users against non-users and find that the users do better at work, you've learned almost nothing. People who show up at a clinic, get a prescription, and stick with an injectable drug for years are not a random slice of the population. They may be sicker in specific ways, but also better informed, more motivated, or more connected to the healthcare system. Any of those things could affect employment and income on their own. You would be measuring the kind of person who takes ozempic and not what ozempic does to them. So the researchers did something clever. They compared people who started ozempic in its first 17 months on the Danish market with people who started the same drug roughly 4 years later. Then, they matched the two groups on age, sex, diabetes, obesity, and a long list of social, health, and economic characteristics. So that left 7011 early starters paired with 7011 near-identical later starters, covering 71.6 percent of everyone eligible in the early group. And the logic is simple. Both groups eventually took ozempic, so they're much more alike than users and non-users would be.
The crucial difference is timing. The later group therefore becomes a stand-in for what might have happened to the early group if their treatment had been delayed by 4 years. But there's one more caveat before we get to the results, because it shapes how we should read them. Everyone in the sample was between 30 and 59 when the study began, and 84 percent had diabetes. So these are not necessarily the people you picture when you hear GLP-1 today.
This was not a broad weight loss population. It was mostly middle-aged people with diabetes, most of whom were already employed, taking the drug for the reason it was originally approved.
So with those caveats in mind, what actually happened after people started taking Ozempic?
First, most of them kept taking it. Four years after starting, 75 percent of early users filled at least one semaglutide prescription that quarter. Now, that doesn't prove continuous use, let alone that every dose was injected. But it is a remarkably high persistence rate for a chronic medication helped in part by Denmark's heavy drug subsidies. And then, the absences started falling. So Denmark's main measure of long-term sick leave generally captures medically certified absences lasting more than 30 days. Before treatment, people in the study spent about 5.5 percent of their months on such leave. But after starting Ozempic, that fell by 0.95 percentage points or 17.3 percent. Put differently, roughly 1 in 6 of those long periods of sick leave disappeared. And the effect took time. In the first 2 years, sick leave fell by about 0.8 percentage points, and by years 3 and 4, the decline had widened to roughly 1.1 points. That's what you might expect if the benefits come from gradual improvements in health rather than something that changes overnight. Even other measures moved in the same direction. Municipality paid sickness benefits, which kick in after the first 30 days of an absence, fell too. The researchers also found fewer emergency department visits, fewer cardiovascular drug prescriptions, and fewer consultations.