Why the same trial gets two different numbers

This is the single biggest reason pipeline coverage confuses people. A modern obesity trial reports its result more than one way, and the two figures can be two or three percentage points apart.

The primary analysis, called the treatment-regimen or treatment-policy estimand, counts everyone who was randomised. If someone stopped the drug at week 12 because of nausea and put the weight back on, their result still counts. It is a fair picture of what happens when a real population is handed a medicine.

The efficacy estimand answers a narrower question: what would the average result have been if everyone had stayed on treatment for the full trial. It is always the bigger number, and it is usually the one that ends up in a headline. Orforglipron at 36 mg in ATTAIN-1 was 11.2% under the primary analysis and 12.4% under the efficacy estimand. MariTide in phase 2 was 12.3% to 16.2% under intention to treat and 16.3% to 19.9% under the efficacy estimand. Neither number is dishonest. They answer different questions, and the tracker above tells you which one you are looking at.

Why you cannot rank these against each other

The trials on this page ran for 36, 48, 52, 68, 72 and 80 weeks. They enrolled different people. Some excluded anyone with type 2 diabetes, and some enrolled only people with it, which matters because weight loss is consistently lower in the diabetes trials across this whole drug class. CagriSema was 20.4% in REDEFINE 1 and 13.7% in REDEFINE 2, same drug, same dose, same 68 weeks.

So a table of headline percentages ordered from largest to smallest is a table of trial designs, not a table of how well the drugs work. The only way to compare two medicines properly is a head-to-head trial that randomises the same people to both.

Approval is not the same thing as availability

Wherever you are, there are three separate gates, and a drug can sit between any two of them for a long time. A regulator grants the licence. A separate body then decides whether the public system pays for it and on what terms. And somewhere in between, the manufacturer has to actually ship it to your country.

In the UK the MHRA grants the licence and NICE decides whether the NHS should fund it. Private prescribing can start after the licence, before or without NICE, which is how Mounjaro reached most UK patients. In Ireland the licence comes from the European Commission on an EMA recommendation and applies across the EU, with the HPRA as national regulator, while reimbursement runs through the NCPE and the HSE. In Australia the TGA registers the medicine and the PBS decides what is subsidised, and those two decisions can be years apart. In the United States the FDA approves and your insurer decides, which is a different problem with the same shape.

So an approval in one country tells you nothing definite about a date in another. Orforglipron is the live example: approved by the FDA in April 2026 and, as of July 2026, approved in none of the other three. More on that in the Foundayo approval write-up.

Ireland: the EU route, and the launch gap

Ireland does not run its own approval process for these medicines. The European Medicines Agency assesses, its human medicines committee issues an opinion, the European Commission grants an authorisation valid in every member state, and the HPRA is the national regulator that oversees it here. That is why Irish brand names match UK ones: Mounjaro is Mounjaro, Wegovy is Wegovy.

Of the 6 records here, one is authorised in Ireland: the Wegovy pill, approved by the European Commission on 15 July 2026 after a positive committee opinion in May 2026. That is where the gap opens. An EU authorisation is permission to market, not a delivery date. Novo Nordisk said only that it would launch the pill in more countries during the second half of 2026, with no Irish date published, and HSE reimbursement would then be a separate decision after that.

The practical version: authorised, on sale, and paid for are three different things, and right now the pill has cleared the first in Ireland only. Ask your pharmacy whether it can actually be dispensed before you plan around it.

Australia: registered and subsidised are not the same word

None of the 6 records on this page is registered by the TGA, so as of July 2026 none of them can lawfully be prescribed or supplied in Australia. Two applications are sitting with the regulator and undecided: Novo Nordisk lodged one for the 25 mg semaglutide tablet in May 2026, and Eli Lilly Australia lodged one for orforglipron in January 2026, which appears on the TGA register of prescription medicines under evaluation with its Australian trade name still to be advised. Foundayo is a US brand name, so it would not be what the box said here.

Two separate decisions get run together constantly in Australian coverage of these drugs, so they are worth keeping apart. The TGA decides whether a medicine may be sold at all. The PBS decides whether the government subsidises it. Both weekly injections are registered for weight management, and neither is subsidised on the PBS for it: the PBS states that the sponsors of tirzepatide have not made a submission to list it for overweight or obesity, and in November 2025 the PBAC recommended listing semaglutide for people with established cardiovascular disease and obesity in certain circumstances, contingent on a price reduction and a risk-sharing arrangement, a listing that had not been completed as of July 2026.

That is also why this page carries no prices, for anyone. The Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code allows a price list for a prescription medicine only from pharmacies, practitioners approved under section 92 and pharmacy banner groups. Healthcount is none of those. A pharmacy can quote you what a dose costs, and your GP can tell you whether any subsidised route applies to you.

The consequence of a drug being unregistered is worth stating plainly. If something is offered to you in Australia as retatrutide, or as an oral GLP-1, it is outside the TGA framework, which means no regulator has checked its contents, its strength or whether it is sterile.

Buying an unlicensed drug is a different risk

Retatrutide is the one people try to buy early, because the trial numbers are the largest on this page. It has no licence in any country. That means no regulator has assessed it, no pharmacy can legally dispense it, and anything sold as retatrutide online has no verified contents, strength or sterility. In July 2026 the BMJ ran a fact check on a reported death in a man who had taken an unapproved retatrutide product.

How this page is maintained

Last checked July 2026. This area moves fast. Approvals, filings and trial readouts can all change within weeks, so check the date above before you rely on anything here, and check the primary sources at the bottom if a decision matters to you.

Peer-reviewed trial figures are taken from the published paper and linked to PubMed. Company topline figures are labelled as such, because a press release is not a peer-reviewed result and the numbers occasionally shift by the time the full paper appears. Where a figure could not be traced to a named source, it was left out rather than estimated.

The approval counts in the summary above are generated from the records rather than written out, so a sentence here cannot go stale ahead of the status boxes on the cards. Regulatory positions are checked in four places: the MHRA for the UK, the FDA for the US, the European Commission and the HPRA for Ireland, and the TGA and the PBS for Australia.

Related reading

• Foundayo (orforglipron): the first GLP-1 pill, and where the UK stands
• Retatrutide compared with Mounjaro, and what the UK position actually is
• CagriSema and Mounjaro: what the trial data does and does not show
• All free Healthcount tools