60 Minutes - 01/01/2023: Radio Free Europe, Mass Extinction, Obesity

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Once seen as a Cold War relic, Radio Free Europe has become a vital tool in today’s battle against disinformation and authoritarianism, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Bill Whitaker reports. Scientists are sounding an alarm that we are living amid the sixth mass extinction, they predict we are just 20 years away from life being altered on Earth again. Scott Pelley reports. Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in America after smoking. Lesley Stahl reports on a new medication that helps with weight loss but is wildly expensive and covered by very few insurance companies. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song. With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases.

The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Where do an estimated 11 million Russians get straight, objective news? From Radio Free Europe. The U.S. government-funded Cold War relic is as relevant as it's ever been. With reporters on the front lines, it's run from Prague

and employs journalists from all over the world. Do all of you expect to return to Russia? Not before Putin dies, I think. Last month, the nations of the world agreed to save nature from mass extinction. But the UN had this meeting in 2010, and not one goal was met. Leading biologists warn that time is running out to slow the rate of extinction around the globe. Which is exactly why I and the vast majority

of my colleagues think we've had it, that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to. If you diet, you lose weight, right? The number one cause of obesity is genetics. That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself,

even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management. So when people see families that have obesity, the assumption is, what are they feeding those kids? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Americans familiar with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty might consider them Cold War relics, vestiges of a time when broadcasting straight news behind the Iron Curtain was considered key to promoting democracy. But with a new Cold War descending and a hot war blazing in the heart of Europe, RFE-RL, as they're also known, are back in vogue.

With a $20 million boost from Congress, the U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcasters are beaming and streaming original content, mostly video these days, into many of the same former Soviet republics they targeted in the 1950s. Marion Kouchnir is a familiar face on Radio Free Europe. One by one, they bring wounded soldiers, medics. A Ukrainian war correspondent, he's been slogging alongside his country's troops with his camera ever since the Russians invaded. Like this. the Russians invaded. We spoke with him in November from a Prague control room alongside his editor.

Kushnir was in Bakhmut, under siege by Russian troops. I will say this in Ukrainian. This is the place where they help Ukrainian soldiers who come here from the front line. This is a field hospital. There are about 100 wounded in here. You were talking about the routine of it all, but does it feel to you that you are daily putting yourself in harm's way? This is the war. I'm always at risk.

Even being right here in this hospital, I understand that next to it some shelling is happening right at this moment. But everyone in Ukraine is now in danger. Kushnir's harrowing accounts can be seen in many formats. Live television, YouTube, TikTok. Conveying as much as he can the reality of humanity's ultimate folly. The war for me is the stench of blood, gunpowder, sweat and constant mud. And there is no romance about the war. It is about fear, grief and tears.

No footage, photos or words can express what is happening right here on the battlefield. We're an international public broadcaster and we operate in, the capital of the Czech Republic, since 1995. We're funded by the U.S. Congress, but by law we're editorially independent of the U.S. government. Today it's not just radio. It's mostly video, correct? Yeah, so we constantly are debating when to change the name, and that may come in the years ahead. So it's mostly seen on the Internet? It varies depending on what market we're in.

In Iran, we're on radio. Pakistan, we're available on radio. But in places like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, people are primarily engaging with our content on social media. This modern newsroom is like a journalistic version of the United Nations. Each service, Russian, Ukrainian, Iranian, and 19 others, is made up of emigres and expats from those countries. They have their own newsrooms and broadcast facilities.

You can read our journalistic standards document online, and we have a rigorous editorial process that determines what we cover. I visit as many of our 20 bureaus as possible. Russia's multi-billion dollar effort to push disinformation abroad has given the Cold War radios new life. They're adding two new bureaus and constructing studios here in Prague for an additional Russian language channel featuring documentaries, music and comedies. This is your area of coverage? Yes. Fly says 40 million people from 23 countries across this broad landmass tune in to their coverage. 11 million inside Russia, despite the Kremlin's labeling them a foreign agent. That is a common refrain we hear from the Kremlin, from authoritarians that don't like us.

And we've dealt with that by being very transparent. We cover governments, even governments that are friendly towards the U.S., just as tough as we cover the Kremlin. Radio Free Europe was created and nurtured by legendary Cold Warriors, including diplomat George Kennan, CIA Director Alan Dulles, and Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. This place, it oozes with history. Can you tell me about the driving force, the soul of this place? Certainly for the journalists, it's a commitment to the truth. We live right now in what some would call a post-truth age, where people increasingly don't even believe in an objective truth.

But this was an organization in the 1950s that was founded on the notion that there is an objective truth. Radio Free Europe combats the Soviet lie with 21 transmitters. One truth the broadcasters still struggle with is the fact that they were originally funded by the CIA. Congress ended that affiliation in 1971 and mandated the radios operate without any U.S. government interference. But that hasn't stopped other governments from interfering with them. The history of Radio Free Europe is filled with Cold War intrigue. The American broadcaster has been a perennial target of Soviet and later Russian spies. A number of deadly plots have been foiled, including one

to poison salt shakers in the cafeteria. Still, some high-profile journalists have been assassinated. Including RFE host and Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was jabbed with a poison umbrella tip in London in 1978. The terrorist, known as Carlos the Jackal, bombed its Munich headquarters in 1981. All told, 18 Radio Free Europe journalists have been killed. Two are imprisoned in Belarus, one in Crimea. Pavel Butorin runs RFE's 24-7 Russian-language television channel Current Time. He told us viewership has soared since the invasion of Ukraine. How many viewers are you getting? For TV alone, we report 6.2 million weekly views. But for digital platforms, this year we've reported 3 billion online views. He says many Russians watch their live YouTube feed in secret, using virtual private networks.

Recently, these stickers started showing up in Russian cities. They appear to be ads for cheap sugar, but when you scan the barcodes... The QR code, those quick response codes, took you to the Current Times website. Another one was, you know, IKEA sale. But the actual QR code took you to our YouTube channel, and we had nothing to do with that. In 2022, the Kremlin turned back the clock. It banned independent media outlets, forced RFE's Moscow bureau to shut down, and made it illegal to call Russia's action in Ukraine a war, with punishment up to 15 years in jail. As anchor of current time's nightly newscast, Ksenia Sokolienskaya flouts that law nearly every

day. Born and raised in Moscow, she is essentially exiled here in Prague. Do you think you will be able to go home someday? I honestly don't know. Really? There is a chance, you know, that me or any of my colleagues could be, you know, detained straight at the airport. I think there is a reason why almost every fair journalist left the country since the beginning of the war. Can you explain to those of us from outside of the country what's happening in Russia? I think that things are moving in a very scary direction. I'm sure that this war brings disastrous consequences, not only for Ukraine and Ukrainians,

but for Russia and Russians. A million Russian citizens have fled the country in the past year and a half, including these four Radio Free Europe journalists, who, until recently, worked in its Moscow bureau. Journalists are fatalists, I think, especially Russian journalists. Fatalists. Fatalists, yes. Sergei Dubrynin is an investigative reporter. Do all of you expect to return to Russia? Not before Putin dies, I think. It's home, though. Yes, I still consider Russia to be home. To me, Russia is occupied by Putin,

and also Russian people are occupied, many of them, by Russian propaganda. Natalia Jompoladova covers human rights. When I came to our funeral, I understood that this media gives you a chance to tell the truth, to cover your stories as you see it, as you want to present it, and there is no pressure of some guidelines from the government. Anastasia Tishchenko is at odds with both her country and her parents, who believe Russian propaganda. ANASTASIA TISHCHENKO, I tried to send them my reports, but they still believe,

not to me, but they still believe to Russian television. They're afraid of truth. PAUL SOLMAN COHEN, Afraid of the truth. ANASTASIA TISHCHENKO, I guess. That's how propaganda works. PAUL SOLMAN COHEN, Alexei Alexandrov did a stint inside Ukraine before leaving Russia. After the war begins, I decided that I would like to go back to Ukraine, not Russia. Because I feel responsible anyway for this war.

What do you mean you feel responsible as a part of Russian society and probably I would like to go back to Ukraine to help the people in Ukraine to rebuild their country his radio free Europe colleagues inside Ukraine have been doing just that Natalie Natalie Sedletska is host and executive producer of an investigative news series. Her reporting helped expose the corruption of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. Now she's uncovering bigger crimes. When the full-scale war started, me and my team, we found out that our investigative skills can really help now in new reality. And we started to investigate Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

You uncovered, you documented war crimes. That's true. You've heard of Bucha, right? Unfortunately, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of such cities that suffered so much from Russian atrocities. Bucha was the site of the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops. Sedletska works in RFE's Kiev bureau under constant threat of Russian missiles. If you can imagine any tragedy, a mother lost her child.

A child lost his mother and dad. Like, imagine all horrible things that are going on now in my country. And you've decided to stay. Being a reporter in Ukraine, it's our mission, of course. So why I'm telling you these stories is because I'm afraid of untold stories. I'm afraid that we will not be able to tell all the truths that is going on because so much is going on.

Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in

the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. In what year will the human population grow too large for the earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet's 3.5 billion people were sustainable, but on this New Year's Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you're about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs. We're going to show you a possible solution.

But first, have a look at how humanity is already suffering from the vanishing wild. In Washington state, the Salish Sea helped feed the world. With this weather and the way things feel once I get out here, it's time to be fishing. That's what it feels like. Commercial fisherman Dana Wilson supported a family on the Salish Sea's legendary wealth of salmon. He remembers propellers churning the water off Blaine, Washington, and cranes straining for the state's $200 million annual catch. That used to be a buying station. They're gone now. They don't buy anymore. So that building over there used to buy salmon. They don't buy

salmon anymore. It's just not here. In 1991, one salmon species was endangered. Today, 14 salmon populations are foundering. They've been crowded out of rivers by habitat destruction, warming, and pollution. Dana Wilson used to fish all summer. Today, a conservation authority grants rare, fleeting permission to throw a net. There was a season. There was a season. Now there's a day. There's a day, sometimes it's hours. Sometimes you might get 12 hours, 16 hours. That's what we're down to. Here, the vanishing wilds scuttled a way of life that began with native tribes a thousand years ago. I don't remember anybody doing anything other than salmon fishing. Fisherman Armando Briones is a member of the Lummi tribe, which calls itself People of the Salmon.

He didn't imagine the rich harvest would end with his five fishing boats. All of a sudden, you're trying to figure out, well, how am I going to make that paycheck for my family? Well, for me it was like, well, I have a backup for a backup for a backup for a backup. Briones' backups include his new food truck, switching to crab fishing, and consulting on cannabis farms. His scramble to adapt is being repeated around the world. A World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years, the abundance of global wildlife has collapsed 69 percent, mostly for the same reason. Too many people, too much consumption, and growth mania. At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough

to see some of his dire prophecies come true. You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable. No, humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle, yours and mine, basically, for the entire planet, you'd need five more Earths. Not clear where they're going to come from. Just in terms of the resources that would be required? Resources that would be required, the systems that support our lives, which of course are the biodiversity that we're wiping out. Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we're sawing off. In 1968, Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford, became a doomsday celebrity with a bestseller forecasting the collapse of nature. When the population bomb came out, you were described as an alarmist. I was alarmed. I am still alarmed.

All of my colleagues are alarmed. The alarm Ehrlich sounded in 68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The Green Revolution fed the world. But he also wrote in 68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice, and humanity would overwhelm the wild. Today, humans have taken over 70% of the planet's land and 70% of the freshwater. The rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time. We know the rate of extinction is extraordinarily high because of a study of the fossil record by biologist Tony Barnofsky, Ehrlich's Stanford colleague. The data are rock solid.

I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an extinction crisis. Barnofsky's research suggests today's rate of extinction is up to 100 times faster than is typical in the nearly 4 billion year history of life. These peaks represent the few times that life collapsed globally, and the last was the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. There are five times in Earth's history where we had mass extinctions, and by mass extinctions I mean at least 75%, three-quarters of the known species, disappearing from the face of the Earth. Now we're witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction,

where the same thing could happen on our watch. It's a horrific state of the planet when common species, the ubiquitous species that we're familiar with, are declining. Tony Barnofsky's colleague in the study of extinction is his wife, biologist Liz Hadley, faculty director at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Research Preserve in California. You know, I see it in my mind, and it's a really sad state. If you spend any time in California, you know the loss of water. The loss of water means that there are dead salmon you see in the river right before your eyes. But it also means the demise of those

birds that rely on the salmon fishery, eagles. It means things like minks and otters that rely on fish. It means that our habitats that we're used to, the forests that, you know, 3,000-year-old forests are going to be gone. So it means silence, and it means some very catastrophic events because it's happening so quickly. It means you look out your window and three-quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That's what mass extinction looks like. What we see just in California

is, you know, the loss of our iconic state symbols. We have no more grizzly bears in California. The only grizzly bears in California are on the state flag? That's our state mammal, and they're not here anymore. Is it too much to say that we're killing the planet? No. I would say it's too much to say that we're killing the planet, because the planet's going to be fine. What we're doing is we're killing our way of life. The worst of the killing is in Latin America, where the World Wildlife Fund study says the abundance of wildlife has fallen 94% since 1970. But it was also in Latin America that we found the possibility of hope.

Mexican ecologist Gerardo Ceballos is one of the world's leading scientists on extinction. He told us the only solution is to save the one-third of the earth that remains wild. To prove it, he's running a 3,000 square mile experiment in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve near Guatemala, he is paying family farmers to stop cutting the forest. We're going to pay each family a certain amount of money that is more than you will get cutting down the forest if you protect it. And how much are you paying out every year?

For instance, each family here will get around $1,000. More than enough here to make up for lost farmland. In total, the payouts come to $1.5 million a year, or about $2,000 per square mile. The tab is paid through the charity of wealthy donors. The investment to protect what is left is, I mean, really small. The payoff on that investment is being collected on Ceballos' jungle cameras. Thirty years ago, the jaguar was very nearly extinct in Mexico. Now, Ceballos says they've rebounded to about 600 in the reserve. There are other places where there are reserves around the world where they've been able to increase the populations of certain species. But I wonder, are all these little success stories

enough to prevent mass extinction? All the big success that we have in protecting forests and recovering animals like tigers in India, jaguars in Mexico, elephants in Botswana, and so on, are incredible, amazing successes. But there are like grains of sand in a beach. And to really make a big impact, we need to scale up this 10,000 times. So they are important because they give us hope, but they are completely insufficient to cope

with climate change. So what would the world have to do? What we would have to do is to really understand that the climate change and species extinction is a threat to humanity. And then put all the machinery of society, political, economic, and social, towards finding solutions to the problems. Finding solutions to the problems was the goal two weeks ago at the UN Biodiversity Conference, where nations agreed to conservation targets. But at the same meeting in 2010, those nations agreed to limit the destruction of the earth by 2020, and not one of those goals was met. This despite thousands

of studies, including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. You know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you're recommending. I know there's no political will to do any of the things that I'm concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it, that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to. In the 50 years since Ehrlich's population bomb, humanity's feasting on resources has tripled.

We're already consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. And consider, half of humanity, about four billion, live on less than ten dollars a day. They aspire to cars, air conditioning, and a rich diet. But they won't be fed by the fishermen of Washington's Salish Sea, including Armando Briones. The tribe has been fishing salmon here for hundreds of years. Yeah. And your generation is seeing the end of that. It's getting harder and harder.

I hate to say it, I don't want to say it's the end of it. Why do you feel so emotionally attached to this? It's everything we know. I'm fortunate enough to know where I know a lot of different things. I've done a lot of different things in my life. I've gotten good at evolving and changing, but not everybody here is built like that. And to some of us, this is what they know. This is all they know. The five mass extinctions of the ancient past were caused by natural calamities, volcanoes, and an asteroid. Today, if the science is right,

humanity may have to survive a sixth mass extinction in a world of its own making. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Almost half of American adults have obesity, a condition that was a fraction of that just 40

years ago. And scientists don't agree on what's caused the dramatic increase. What everyone does agree on is that it's a major health crisis because obesity can cause type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and more than a dozen cancers. Now there's a medication that leads to dramatic weight loss, but it's wildly expensive. Hollywood celebrities take it to flatten their tummies, but few can afford the thousands of dollars they cost a year. And very few insurance companies will cover it, even though in 2013, the American Medical Association, some would say, finally, recognized obesity as a disease. It's a brain disease.

It is? It's a brain disease. And the brain tells us how much to eat and how much to store. Dr. Fatima Cody-Stanford, an obesity doctor at Mass General Hospital, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, says common beliefs about obesity are all wrong. It is your turn to get on that scale. And diet shows, like The Biggest Loser,

You lost 128 pounds. ...are snookering people. If you diet, you lose weight. Right? For many of us, we can go on a diet, something like

The Biggest Loser, right? You go and you restrict people, you make them work out for 10 hours a day, and then you feed them 500 calories. For most people, they will acutely lose weight.

But 96% of those participants in The Biggest Loser regained their weight because their brain worked well. It was supposed to bring them back to store what they needed or what the brain thinks it needs. So willpower, throw that out the window. My last patient that I saw today was a young woman who's 39 who struggles with severe obesity. She's been working out five to six times a week consistently. She's eating very little. Her brain is defending a certain set point. A set point, says Dr. Stanford, is a range of weight your brain is in charge of maintaining by controlling how much food you eat and how much of it you store.

One theory is that it's an evolutionary survival mechanism that helped retain fat during famines. So we had COVID. Lots and lots of people gained weight. Do those people have a new set point that's higher now? Absolutely. So when you have a chronic stressor and you get to a certain weight and maintain that weight for, let's say, at least three to six months, then you recalibrate that set point to a different set point. I've always heard that it's the fast food, that it's the diet Cokes, that kind of thing, that is the instigator. Is

that true? So I think we have to look at the different causes of obesity as a big pie. And that's one factor. But notice how I'm using this part of the pie, right? But the number one cause of obesity is genetics. That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management. So when people see families that have obesity, the assumption is, what are they feeding those kids? They're doing something wrong. Actually, do you know this? 79 to 90% of physicians in the United States have significant bias towards individuals that are heavier. Now doctors listening to me may say, oh it's not me.

Hold your horses because has that patient come to you and told you, look doc, I'm eating well. Look doc, I'm exercising. And the doc says to them, are you sure? I don't believe that that's really what you're doing. Wait, are you saying that doctors don't understand obesity? Doctors? Doctors do not understand obesity. In one of her published studies, Dr. Stanford found that most medical schools don't teach that obesity is a disease.

And in fact, don't even offer courses on it. Even though it's the second leading cause of preventable death in the country after smoking. Nicole Sams, mother of five from Rhode Island, spent years going to doctors who all had the same message. Well, you just have to go see a dietician. And I did. I did everything I was told to do. I went to a dietician. I, you know, I sat, had the rubber foods come in front of me, oh, only eat this portion, I'm like, ugh. Maya Cohen went on her first diet when she was 13. At her heaviest, at 5 feet tall, she weighed 192 pounds. Did you feel that people looked at you and said, why doesn't she stop eating?

She's eaten her way to that. You know, you look at someone and you internalize, oh, they must think I'm eating too much. So it's just after a while, you just personally think that, okay, everyone's telling me that I'm, that this is a flaw in my character. Therefore, it must be true. And so you start believing this. Don't you think if people walking down the street with obesity, stigmatized as they are, shunned, don't you think if they could lose weight and keep it off, they would? Dr. Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Weight Management and Wellness Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Exercise is good. I'm walking a lot. Austin, who sees both Maya Cohen and Nicole Sams, is relieved that at last she has a highly

effective medication to offer her patients that's safe, according to the FDA. It's part of a new generation of medications that brings about an impressive average loss of 15 to 22 percent of a person's weight, and it helps keep it off. Doctors Apovian and Stanford have been advising companies developing drugs for obesity, including the Danish company Novo Nordisk, an advertiser on this broadcast. It makes the drug Wegovi that you inject yourself once a week with something like an EpiPen. It's not easy to get.

The drug is currently in short supply, and it costs more than $1,300 a month. People in Hollywood can afford these expensive injections, and they're taking them. And they're not necessarily people with obesity. We have a national shortage on these medications. If those that have the means are able to get them, yet the people that really need them are unable to, then that creates a greater disparity, right? The haves and the have-nots. The vast majority of people with obesity simply

can't afford Wegovi, and most insurance companies refuse to cover it, partly because, as AHIP, the Health Insurance Trade Association, explained in a statement, these drugs have not yet been proven to work well for long-term weight management and can have complications and adverse impacts on patients. What we've seen so far is really nausea, vomiting. You know, that's why these drugs are dosed slowly and starting with low doses. And build up. And build up.

Dr. Apovian says most of the side effects go away over time. We are frustrated every single day when we see patients who desperately need to lose weight to reduce the diabetes, reduce the hypertension, very effective and safe, and we can't give it to them because insurance won't cover it. I receive emails about denials that state that we're denying this because the doctor has not counseled the patient on behavior change as part of this. That's where the stigma of obesity comes in. The idea that the patient can do it with diet and exercise. You would never do that to a patient with hypertension or heart disease or type 2 diabetes.

Tell them that just don't eat sugar, you'll be fine. Novo Nordisk also makes a drug for type 2 diabetes called Ozempic, which most insurers and employers do cover. What frustrates the doctors is that Ozempic and Wegovy are exactly the same drug, though Wegovy for obesity is usually prescribed at a higher dosage. When Maya Cohen wanted the medication for obesity... My insurance company told me that they considered a vanity drug. A vanity drug. So that suggests that the insurance company does not consider obesity a disease.

Correct. Nicole was also denied coverage. On its website, her health plan through the state of Rhode Island puts anti-obesity medications in the same category as drugs for erectile dysfunction and cosmetic purposes. There are about 110 million Americans eligible for an anti-obesity medication, making it a costly investment for insurance. But if they covered it, overall government and private health care spending would probably come down. Just take diabetes that is, in many cases, caused by obesity. Diabetes costs more than $300 billion a year, most of which is covered through Medicare and Medicaid. But University of Chicago health care economist Thomas Philipson points out that there's actually a law that prevents Medicare from covering weight loss drugs.

You would think that that insurance program for older adults would see an enormous benefit to these drugs. Yeah. A third of Medicare spending is diabetes, you know, which is highly tied to obesity. And Medicare kind of sees all the health care expenses when you get older, when you have a heart disease, et cetera, from your obesity. I think what ultimately will drive it is that they have evidence that this is actually going to lower total Medicare costs. Great, great. When Dr. Apovian told both Maya Cohen and Nicole Sams that their obesity was not a weakness of willpower, they were blown away. I looked at her and I said, I don't believe you. What do you mean it's not my fault? It is my fault because it's what I heard for my entire life. I went home that day like a

boulder had come off my shoulders. Like, okay, there's finally hope. There's hope. Did you cry? I did. A lot. All those years of thinking that somehow you have no willpower and it's your moral failing and you're a glutton and why did you eat so much and feeling shame. It's the shame. Yeah. Yeah. It's the shame. It's the shame. Maya was ultimately able to get the medication covered by her insurance

because she has type 2 diabetes. She's lost more than 50 pounds. Dr. Apovian says she does have to continue dieting and exercising. And like most patients, will be taking the drug indefinitely to maintain her weight. Nicole doesn't have type 2 diabetes. Nicole, we called your insurance company, and they gave us a statement. Okay. Earlier this year, the state of Rhode Island,

in consultation with its pharmacy benefits manager, decided that health insurance for the state of Rhode Island employees would cover the entire class of anti-obesity drugs. Really? This coverage change goes into effect January 2023. I'm so happy for you. Yes, this is great. This is great.

Wow. Wow. Wow. In its statement, the Health Insurance Trade Association said, Obesity is a complex disease, and the evidence and clinical guidelines related to obesity treatment are evolving rapidly. Health insurance providers will continue to review the clinical evidence. Last night marked not only the end of a year, but also the end of an era. Dr. Anthony Fauci, at 82, President Biden's chief medical advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, stepped down after nearly 39 years. In eight 60-minute stories, Dr. Fauci spoke with our late colleague Ed Bradley about the development of AIDS drugs, with us about

questionable cures for AIDS. Leslie Stahl asked about drug-resistant superbugs. Steve Croft talked with him about H5N1 bird flu. In 2016, it was mosquito-borne Zika and recently COVID-19. Dr. Fauci spoke directly in language the average American could understand. And he wasn't afraid of a little controversy in the service of science and medicine. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. And Happy New Year.