KEY DETAILS
Ozempic carries 699 vision loss reports and 460 gastroparesis reports in the trailing twelve months, while Wegovy shows zero in all six tracked categories.
Both products are semaglutide, so the gap is far more likely to be about how reports get named than about the medicine.
A report in the FDA database records a suspicion, not a proven cause, and anyone can file one.
Severe nausea, vomiting and dehydration are the most reported problems across every GLP-1 in the database, running into the thousands for Mounjaro and Zepbound.
Ozempic and Wegovy are the same medicine, semaglutide, sold under two names for two uses. In the FDA's public side effect database, one of them carries hundreds of reports across every category tracked and the other carries none at all. That gap is worth understanding, mostly so it is not misread.
Across the trailing twelve months, the database holds 699 vision loss reports, 460 gastroparesis reports, 195 pancreatitis reports, 85 suicidal ideation or self-injury reports and 28 thyroid cancer reports naming Ozempic. For Wegovy, every one of those six categories reads zero.
A report in this database is not a finding. Anyone can file one, including patients, family members and manufacturers, and a report only records that someone believed a medication was involved. It does not establish that the drug caused anything, and the FDA says so itself.
The likely explanations are about paperwork rather than safety. Reports are filed under the brand name someone writes down, and where a report names the ingredient or the more familiar brand, the count follows that name rather than the prescription. Ozempic is the name most people know, which is the sort of thing that skews a voluntary database. No one has published an explanation of this particular gap, so that stays a reasonable guess rather than an answer.
What the numbers do show clearly is the shape of the reports for the drugs that have them. Severe nausea, vomiting and dehydration dominate every product in the database, running into the thousands for Mounjaro and Zepbound, while the categories people fear most, thyroid cancer among them, stay in the single or double digits.
If you take Wegovy, the zeros do not mean it is safer than Ozempic, and if you take Ozempic, the hundreds do not mean it is dangerous. They are the same drug. The reason to look at this database at all is to see which side effects people actually report often enough to ask about, and severe nausea and dehydration are at the top of that list by a wide margin.
Sources
FDA FAERS: Public dashboard of adverse event reports
Originally published on GLP1Laws.
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