60 Minutes - 11/03/2024: Election Truth, Unintended Consequences, The Land of Novo

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Days before America elects its 60th president of the United States, all eyes are on Georgia after it was a center of the scheme to overthrow the 2020 election. In this year’s high-stakes race, correspondent Scott Pelley reports on how Georgia officials plan to ensure public trust, combat election fraud conspiracy theories, and protect the safety of poll workers. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, 20 states have either banned or severely restricted abortions, six states have voted to protect access to them, and this Tuesday voters in 10 states will decide on adding abortion rights to their state constitutions. To better understand the profound impact of the fast changing and complex legal landscape, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi visited Texas, the first state to change its abortion laws. Alfonsi interviewed doctors and mothers who say the laws intended to stop abortions are resulting in unintended consequences, hurting women with desired pregnancies and the people who care for them. Tiny Denmark—with its population of six million of the world's wealthiest and healthiest people—is suddenly home to Europe's largest company, Novo Nordisk. The company's weight loss wonder drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have slimmed down millions while adding great heft to the Danish economy. The firm now has a market cap of roughly half a trillion dollars, which is larger than the entire country’s GDP. Jon Wertheim travels to the Baltic to see how a country with a slender ego is coping with this unlikely injection of fantastic wealth. 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

Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. 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. This is the end of the show. and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Election Day comes in an anxious time.

Why should Americans have confidence in this election? We have tons of people, processes, and policies in place in all 50 states in the district to assure that the outcome of the election is correct. Correct, but maybe not as fast as our nerves would like. So on election night, don't expect to know the winner. We probably will have a pretty good idea who won the presidency maybe around Thursday or Friday. Tonight, you will hear from doctors who say the new abortion laws in Texas are creating unintended consequences for medical professionals and the women they care for. Five years ago, I could counsel a patient on all the various treatment options, and now it is a dangerous situation for me. Dangerous because? Because I could face life in prison just for having a conversation with my patient about evidence-based care.

There is very little rotten in the state of Denmark. This is the land that gave us Lego, province of peddling, all fishing nets and safety nets. Today, the spike in demand for the Danish-made drug Ozempic is fattening the country's economy, creating thousands of jobs and keeping mortgage rates low. In the pharmaceutical giant behind it all, Novo Nordisk now has a market cap larger than Denmark's entire GDP. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning.

You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Tuesday, Americans will consider a question more vital than who wins the White House. They'll decide whether they have faith in the ballot.

Whether January 6, 2021 was the end of chaos or the beginning. Election fraud lies are aimed at destroying confidence. You're about to hear why they are lies. Gabriel Sterling is a messenger of election truth. He's the Republican chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State who runs elections there. Georgia was the center of the scheme to overthrow the 2020 election. Sterling says these are the stakes this Tuesday. People have to have faith in the outcomes. And for 200 and some odd years, we had to have the acceptance of the person

who came in second or lost to say, you know what, I lost. I will come back again and fight in two years. The reason we have ballots is to avoid bullets. And if you say ballots don't matter anymore, there's only one logical direction to go, and that's not healthy in any democracy. Why should Americans have confidence in this election? Every state in this country now has poked and prodded and looked at their processes. And we know that while we all do it slightly differently, everybody assures that there's one person and one vote. Everybody assures that there is a single ballot cast.

Nearly every state in the union now has audits after the fact. Every state in the union tests their equipment beforehand in a public way. We have tons of people, processes, and policies in place in all 50 states in the district to assure that the outcome of the election is correct. And there are millions of people who are skeptical about what you just said. There's always some level of skepticism. It's always there, but it's reached a different level in the 2020 and 2024 elections. In the 2020 election, President Trump lost Georgia by a slender 11,779 votes. Two recounts confirmed his loss, but he said this. Nobody wants to see the kind of fraud that this election has really come to represent. We are looking at things that are so bad in Georgia.

Four days before the vote was to be certified on January 6th, Trump called Sterling's boss, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. In a state where Republicans controlled every branch of government, Raffensperger stood up to Trump on the call. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right. Trump's lawyers brought shocking tales of fraud to the legislature. But investigations by the state police, FBI, and Raffensperger's office found none was true.

They said there were 66,000 underage voters. There were zero. Then they said that there was 2,423 non-registered voters. There were zero. But you're a Republican. He was your president. I work for the people of Georgia. I respond, and I work for the voters of Georgia. My job is to run a fair, honest, accurate election. But fairness and honesty were met with threats of violence. It has all gone too far. Death threats to his election workers snapped Republican Gabe Sterling's patience.

It has to stop. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up, and if you're going to take a position of leadership, show some. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed. His warning was five weeks before January 6th. More than 1,000 rioters have been convicted, just part of the election lie chaos. Trump filed 64 lawsuits and lost 63. Lawyer Rudy

Giuliani was sued to bankruptcy after falsely accusing Georgia election workers of fraud. Fox News paid $787 million to settle a suit that said Fox knew it was lying about the election. And Trump was indicted in Georgia. He's pleaded not guilty to election interference, but four co-defendants did plead guilty to related charges. Sterling hoped his message would get through to everyone, but it hasn't. And there's some you're never going to convince. And you just have to accept that you're never going to convince them.

But for the vast majority of Americans who have questions, basically they're, well, there's this much smoke, there must be something. Nobody would lie this much about it. So I think there's savable souls there who basically, they want to understand. We have to tell them over and over again, voter suppression's fake, voter fraud is fake, it's used to raise money and get you angry. Trump riled supporters with election denial from the very first time he was ever on a Republican ballot. He lost the Iowa caucus in 2016 and wrote,

Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. Later, when Trump won the national electoral vote, but not the popular vote, he posted, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. Later, a fraud commission he appointed disbanded when it couldn't find the evidence. People are going to say that the election was stolen. It's inevitable. Yes, it is. And to them, you say what?

I'm sorry that your candidate lost, but the rules are the rules, the law is the law, and the count is the count. Georgia, in many ways, is a model. They do a lot of things exceptionally well. Few people know elections like David Becker. Georgia in many ways is a model. They do a lot of things exceptionally well. Few people know elections like David Becker. At the Justice Department, he helped enforce voting rights. Later, he led the creation of a voter registration data center that is used today by half the states.

Becker is a CBS News election consultant. One of the things everyone should understand is the claims about election theft and fraud are not driven by the actual policies that exist in the states. They're driven by one factor and one factor only, and that's whether your candidate won. Sadly, tens of millions of Americans have been targeted for this disinformation. They've been preyed upon by losing candidates and foreign adversaries. And importantly, they have donated money because a lot of this is financial.

There's a financial incentive for those who spread the lies, who have raised, let's face it, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars off the lie that our elections aren't to be trusted Let's look at some of the conspiracy theories of fraud. We'll take them one at a time bogus votes are electronically inserted into tabulation machines They're not connected to the Internet. They are under strict physical chain of custody it is really hard to get access to a physical machine and do anything to it and even if there were some attempt to hack the machine or probably more likely have some kind of malfunction of the machine, the audits would catch it. Another of the conspiracy theories is that illegal immigrants are voting by the millions. That is 100 percent false.

Every single voter has to give a driver's license number or a social security number, which is matched against files, databases that are held to make sure the voter is who they say they are and they're eligible to vote. And we also know that states who have gone looking for non-citizens voters have found shockingly few even potential non-citizen registrants. Ohio just recently announced that in a period of time of over a decade, it had found six possible cases of non-citizens voting. But fraud does happen, doesn't it?

It happens very rarely. We know how much fraud in this country happens. We know it's not zero, but it's very, very close to zero. We're not talking about millions of votes or hundreds of thousands of votes. No, we're talking about dozens of votes in a big national election. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to steal a big national election. We are so decentralized with almost 10,000 different jurisdictions run by Democratic and Republican election officials. Our voter lists are as accurate as they ever have been before,

and they're checked regularly. David Becker told us the key to confidence in this election is the paper ballot. 95-plus percent of all Americans are going to vote on paper ballots, which are verifiable and auditable to confirm the count was accurate. And then we audit those ballots, which means we do hand counts of the ballots to compare them to the machine counts

to make sure the machines got the right result. Why should we trust the people who are working the election? I can tell you I've been working with election officials for over a quarter of a century. And when you talk to these election officials out there, Republicans and Democrats, they don't do this because it makes them rich and famous don't do this because it makes them rich and famous. They do this because it's a calling. A calling heard by George Harrison,

Beverly Wojtyla, and Paul Petruska, trained poll workers near Atlanta. They told us when there's a problem, it's nearly always a mistake the voter made. And there's a saying at state headquarters, if you don't know how anything works, everything's a conspiracy. Sometimes they just want to vent. Sometimes they just want to have somebody listen to their question and say, hey, I have this question, what about this? I try to have all my voters, by the time they leave, be in a better mood than when they came in.

Election doubters are welcome to volunteer, like two skeptical women who took the four-hour training course recently. And they just wanted to see for themselves, and they were both convinced by the time they left training that everything was on the up and up. I would say to the voters that are watching this, stay off the Internet, listen to the people, come down here and talk to us.

Fact-check with more than Facebook and TikTok. That's what I would want people to take away from this whole entire conversation, is that gossip, gossip kills. Gossip isn't the only menace. Many Georgia poll workers have a 911 panic button on a lanyard. Offices are armed with the antidote Narcan.

Last year, fentanyl was mailed in an attack on election workers just doing their jobs. They want to ensure that all eligible voters and only eligible voters can vote in a system that is accurate and breeds confidence. But confidence remains under attack. This Post last week claimed illegal Haitian immigrants are voting with Georgia driver's licenses. The FBI traced it to Russia. Election consultant David Becker told us there'll be more disinformation and a few breakdowns and mistakes, none of which should be confused with fraud. What should we expect in terms of results on election night?

So on election night, don't expect to know the winner. Definitely don't expect to know who controls the United States House of Representatives. There are a lot of very close races, even in places like California, that will take days or maybe even weeks to resolve. The Senate we might know a little bit sooner, but unclear. We probably will have a pretty good idea who won the presidency maybe around Thursday or Friday. That's because the race is essentially tied, including in Georgia, where Gabriel

Sterling, the Republican Secretary of State's Chief Operating Officer, hopes America can endure its next close election without coming apart. What is it like to be the chief operating firewall against lies and myths in the election? I've never heard it put to me quite that way. Wild horses couldn't drag me away from this job right now. I mean, I know our system is great in this state. I know the elections across America are safe and secure. I know that 2024 will be the safest and most secure election in history. It will be the most scrutinized election in history. And whoever the winner is, be it Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, we will know that they are the correct winner at the end of the day.

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. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 20 states banned or severely restricted abortion. Six states voted to protect access to it, and on Tuesday, voters in 10 states

will decide on measures that would add abortion rights to their state constitutions. To understand the impact of the changing legal landscape and its complexities, we went to the first state to change its abortion laws — Texas. Tonight, you will hear from doctors who say, in Texas, the laws designed to stop abortions are creating unintended consequences, hurting women with desired pregnancies and the people who care for them. My mom is a doctor, and she is probably the coolest person I've ever met. And I grew up, you know, with her coming home in her white coat, and I honestly just wanted to be my mom.

In 2021, Dani Matheson was following in her mother's footsteps, on her way to becoming an OBGYN. She was 25 years old in her final year of medical school in Texas, married to her high school sweetheart, and ready to start a family. We planned it out perfectly. I was going to get pregnant at this time, and it was going to be great. You had it planned. I had it planned down to like the week. Matheson was thrilled when she learned she was pregnant. Early scans and testing showed a healthy baby girl.

But a routine fetal anatomy scan at 20 weeks did not go according to plan. What did they tell you was wrong? Her brain was not formed correctly. She only had one kidney. Her spine was so bent that it put pressure on her heart. It was honestly a blur. I either said, is it bad or is it lethal? Her answer was, it's lethal.

Meaning my daughter that I planned out to tea and we'd already started to get little outfits and bath toys was going to die. What did you do? Screamed, cried, got a second opinion, got a third opinion. And it wasn't a question as to what we were going to do. It was a question of how we were going to do it without getting arrested. That's because just two weeks earlier, a new Texas law went into effect known as SB8,

Senate Bill 8. And this bill says we'll protect that life when that heartbeats detected. The law banned abortion at six weeks with no provisions for victims of rape, incest, or severe fetal abnormalities like Danny's case. The law also included a novel enforcement method deputizing citizens to sue people for aiding or abetting an abortion and rewarding successful lawsuits with a $10,000 bounty. The bill included an exception for medical emergencies, but didn't define what those were. Matheson says her doctor seemed scared and confused. It wasn't clear what counted as aiding and abetting somebody getting an abortion. So they couldn't even counsel me and say, like,

yes, we recommend you have an abortion or at least look into it, even if you go to another state. So Matheson and her husband turned to her mother, the physician, for help. Several calls later, her mom secured an appointment for her to end her pregnancy at a clinic in neighboring New Mexico, a non-ban state. She put her license on the line for that because I'm her baby and that's what I needed. She booked our plane ticket, she booked our hotel, and gave us an envelope of cash. And you were afraid to use a credit card or have your name attached to anything?

Yeah, we paid for the abortion in cash so that there wasn't a paper trail of our Texas credit cards paying for an abortion. A year after SB-8 went into effect and Roe was overturned, Texas enacted another, more restrictive law, banning all abortion from conception except when the mother's life was in immediate danger. In 2023, Danny Matheson joined 19 women with similar stories in a lawsuit against the Texas government for denial of care. It is the first lawsuit in which individual women have sued a state. The lawsuit did not seek to overturn the bans, rather to clarify which exceptions were allowed under the law. I was in septic shock. The Texas Supreme Court ultimately rejected their case. Mr. Speaker. But after the women filed their lawsuit, Texas legislators quietly passed a new

law to include two exceptions to the ban. One for ectopic pregnancies, when a pregnancy occurs outside the uterus. The other when a woman's water breaks prematurely. But according to the Cleveland Clinic, those instances only make up 5% of all pregnancies. The inconsistencies, the misunderstanding, the confusion, this is why women will lose their lives because of these rules. Dr. Emily Briggs practices family medicine in Central Texas. Hey there. Good morning. Her office is papered with the photos of some of the babies she's delivered over the last 15 years. She's overseen hundreds of complicated pregnancies. Five years ago, I could counsel a patient on all the various treatment options available in these medically complex situations.

And now it is a dangerous situation for me to have that comprehensive conversation with my patients. Dangerous because? Because I personally, as a family physician, could face losing my license. I could face life in prison. I could face huge fines just for having a conversation with my patient about evidence-based care. So far, that hasn't happened. No physician has been prosecuted for violating the ban, which is a felony in Texas. How does the office look today?

Dr. Briggs says the threat of prosecution has created such fear that today it's not unusual for hospitals to require physicians to consult with staff attorneys when treating complicated pregnancies, even miscarriages. This is not the medical care that those of us in medicine signed up for. This is not what our plan was or is when talking to a patient about their care. It should be between me and the patient. There's so much guilt when you lose a patient about their care. It should be between me and the patient. There's so much guilt when you lose a pregnancy.

So add to that the slap in the face of having the risk department of the hospital come in and be involved in that conversation between you and your physician. And it's because of the legal ramifications from our legislature. When there's a sense of urgency, like we need to deal with this right now,

how do you proceed in this moment? With great caution. In these situations, time is of the essence. She could lose her uterus. She could lose her life because of these situations. And when we have our hands tied and can't act appropriately at the medically appropriate time, we can have worsened outcomes. Texas has only released maternal death data through 2021.

But according to CDC numbers, after Texas restricted abortion, maternal deaths rose 61 percent from 2019, compared to 8 percent nationwide. Dr. Emily Briggs says physicians can no longer offer comprehensive maternity care to women in Texas. Have you heard from colleagues who say, I don't want to practice medicine in Texas anymore? Yes, definitely. Obstetricians, family physicians, yes. Last year, the number of OBGYN resident applicants in Texas dropped 16 percent. What does that say to you? That says to me that future obstetricians are acknowledging the complexity of the rules in Texas. So not only do they not want to train here, but that also means that they won't want to practice here.

So we have a patient ready. Adrienne Smith, who was a resident in Texas, transferred to the University of New Mexico Hospital this year. She told us one of her last cases in Texas still haunts her. A young woman who became extremely ill after she tried to end her own pregnancy with an unknown medication she bought in Mexico. Smith spoke to a supervising physician about the case. I remember being like, I wish that there was something more I could do for her. And he looked at me and said,

the attorney general is looking to make an example out of somebody, and you don't want to be that case. And that was when I realized that there are people that are looking to criminalize me for that and send me to jail. Dr. Eve Espy is the chair of the OBGYN department at the University of New Mexico. What is it that a resident can learn here in New Mexico that they can't learn in Texas? I mean so many things. They lack an opportunity to learn trauma-informed care, diagnosing pregnancy complications in the first trimester and in the second trimester.

They miss learning miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care, pregnancy of unknown location. I mean, the list goes on and on. I mean, those seem like pretty important things to know how to do. Really important things to know how to do. Really important things. Those things are part of the training required to become a certified OBGYN anywhere in the U.S. But here's the problem. In Texas, some training is no longer offered because of the new laws. That means OBGYN residents now have to leave the state for two to four week rotations to get the required training. Is that long enough to really learn the lessons of all these various things you've just described?

No, it's not enough time. I mean, our residents have a dedicated rotation in the first year, in the fourth year, but they are working alongside of us throughout their four years of residency. And Dr. Espy says her hospital isn't just absorbing more residents. Data shows more than 34,000 Texas women traveled out of state for care last year. We've seen an enormous increase in our out-of-state patient volume. Just in calendar year 2023 compared to 2019, we saw an over 300% increase. 300%? Over a 300% increase. And we, you know, on any given day in 2023, 70%, 71% of our

patients were from Texas. Today, women making that journey face even more risks. Six Texas counties have imposed travel bans, which threaten legal action against anyone helping to transport women out of state for abortion services. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit demanding access to the medical records of women leaving the state for that care. We reached out to Paxton's office multiple times over the last two months to ask about the issue and got no response. So many of the patients who come to us that we diagnose with a miscarriage, they're like, I'm done with Texas. I want my care here. I can't trust my own doctor to take care of me for a miscarriage or a pregnancy complication. Danny Matheson was one of them.

After the loss of her baby in Texas, she and her husband moved to Hawaii to begin her OBGYN residency and start a family. I did not want to be pregnant in Texas. Absolutely not. I think I know too much about what can go wrong in a pregnancy to feel comfortable being pregnant in Texas. Absolutely not. I think I know too much about what can go wrong in a pregnancy to feel comfortable being pregnant in Texas. Earlier this year, the Mathesons welcomed Emerson, a healthy baby girl. Dr. Emily Briggs is urging Texas lawmakers to work with doctors. EMILY BRIGGS, Texas Lawmaker, We are not looking at this from a partisan standpoint. We're not saying we're enemies. What we need not looking at this from a partisan standpoint.

We're not saying we're enemies. What we need to look at this as is we can all come together to make this safer for women in Texas just by making some changes to these rules. If nothing changes, then what? We lose physicians in Texas. We lose healthy mothers. We lose families in general. It's already scary to decide to become pregnant. Throw on top of that that if something medically complex happened,

you could lose your life and not have the care that you deserve. Why would anybody stay for that? Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side. Or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It has the ring of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, if a supremely ironic one. Tiny Denmark is home to 6 million of the world's wealthiest and healthiest people,

all those musely, munching cyclists. Even their letter O's sometimes come slashed in half. But Denmark is also home to what is suddenly Europe's largest company, Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical firm with a market cap of a half-trillion dollars thanks to products that, wait for it, combat obesity. Novo's drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have slimmed down Hollywood stars and millions of non-celebrities worldwide, while adding great heft to Denmark's economy. We travel to the Baltic to see how a country with a slender ego is coping with this most unlikely injection of fantastic wealth. Just another Copenhagen commuter headed off to work in the morning,

Lotte Baranutsen goes unnoticed, first on the train, then, pep in her step, walking from the station to the office she shares with two others. Understating matters, as one does in Denmark, you'd never know from appearances that she is the scientist whose research at Novo Nordisk led to perhaps the most revolutionary drug this century. I'm so grateful. I've always just been a nerdy little scientist who kind of found home here in this company for 35 years. Is that really your sense of self still these days? I'm proud, but I'm also humble and really very focused on the fact that it was a team effort. Modesty aside, her discoveries helped create Ozempic and Wegovy,

which not only treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, but are now approved for treating cardiovascular disease as well. This, of course, has made her a billion and not so fast. You know, I'm actually not super interested in actually having a whole lot of money. I don't think that it doesn't look like it's making people happy, right? Money's not something that's important to you. I like to pay my taxes. I like the society that we live in. I like that there's equal access to health care. I really like that.

Long as she brought it up, let's get this out of the way. There is very little rotten in the state of Denmark. This is the land that gave us Lego. Province of peddling. All fishing nets and safety nets. And today, Novo Nordisk's success in the spike in demand for Ozempic is fattening the country's economy, creating thousands of jobs, bolstering national pension plans, keeping mortgage rates low. Novo now has a market cap larger than the entire country's GDP. Giving rise to a new national emblem. Drugs so popular they've become embedded in pop culture,

at least in the U.S., where the company advertises liberally, including on this broadcast. But in Denmark, pharmaceutical advertising is illegal. This is very, very unfamiliar for Danish persons, this kind of advertisement. They wouldn't like it. It's not very Danish. Peter Lund Madsen is a celebrated neurologist and writer, and like most Danes, delighted that America's demand for Novo Nordisk drugs is Denmark's gain. Help us understand where this company fits in the Danish national consciousness right now. Novo is a part of Denmark because we are a small country, and finally we have a big company in Europe, much bigger than anything the Swedes have.

So we like that notion. You can hold us over the Swedes. Yes, yes. Because they've always had cars and airplanes and big companies, but now we have Novo. Take that, IKEA. Yes, yes, yes. It's the first time. Danishness courses through Novo Nordisk's bloodstream.

The company was founded in the early 1920s by August Crowe, a Nobel laureate, and his wife Marie, a doctor. Their motivation wasn't financial, it was personal. Marie was diagnosed with diabetes, at the time a death sentence. This drug that we're seeing right here helped save the life of Marie. It did. She was very discreet about it. She did not want anybody to know that she was diabetic because Marie was a doctor. She was not a patient. Hannah Sindbeck, a Danish journalist,

has written two books about Novo Nordisk and the crows. We spoke to her in a lecture theater in what was the Danish medical school where the crows first met. Is it fair to say that this origin story of Novo Nordisk starts as a love story? It is absolutely fair to say it. He was teaching her as she was a medical student. He fell in love with her right away. When in 1922 they heard that Canadian scientists had stumbled upon a miracle cure for diabetes, insulin, they traveled to Toronto and came home with the right to manufacture the drug in Scandinavia.

Sounds very nice of the Canadian scientists. Did they ask for anything else in return? They asked that nobody should, person should profit from it. It should be to the benefit of humanity. That was the price, you can say. It was a way to get this life-saving drug out in the world fast. Back in Denmark, within months, they set up the Nordisk Insulin Company. In keeping with their agreement, they established a non-profit foundation, which today controls 77% of the

company's voting shares. So the agreement was that if there were revenues in proceed from the sales of insulin here in Scandinavia, it should be returned to society in the form of support for research into physiology and medicine. Mats Krogsgaard is the foundation's CEO. Today, it is the largest philanthropic organization in the world, bigger than the Gates Foundation. This is actually a 384 plate that Karen has there. While Novo Nordisk always focused on diabetes drugs, it did branch out beyond medicine. In the late 80s, young Lotta Knudsen was assigned to the enzyme team,

which had the noble goal of making sure reds and whites didn't run in the wash. You started with laundry detergent. Yes, I did. Yeah. It's the same story, right, of just wanting to make a product that's useful. In the early 90s, she came across a new study about a naturally occurring gut hormone, GLP-1, that lowered blood sugar levels and suppressed appetite. She thought if it could be harnessed into a drug, it could revolutionize treatment for diabetes and obesity.

She went to her boss, Novo's head of research, Mats Krogsgaard. Yes, the same guy who now heads the foundation. What do you remember about her? She was the first one to march into my office with red hair and very fired up, showing me a publication that was not even published yet. She was talking very agitatedly about this, and I was getting excited. I understand you also had to convince senior management about obesity and what it was, that this wasn't a behavioral choice necessarily. They felt, just go up on a bike, do some jogging, do some biking.

Just get off the couch and exercise. Yeah. And I started trying to convince them that it's not getting on the bike. If you're genetically predisposed, living in the environment we are in today, you're at very high risk and something should be done about that. For the next 20 years, they worked on that GLP-1 molecule before Ozempic finally made it to market as a type 2 diabetes drug. It took another four years for Wegovi to be approved for weight loss. It turned Novo Nordisk from niche player to a company bigger than Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. The CEO is Lars Freugard Jørgensen. So typically Danish, his compensation package of roughly $10 million is dwarfed by his U.S. counterparts. His office is a co-working space atop Novo's Copenhagen headquarters,

designed in the shape of an insulin molecule. So your next building needs to be the molecule of an anti-obesity drug. Yes, it should. Jorgensen is only the fifth chief executive since the company was founded. Ask him about the weight of the job, and no CEO god complex here, he defaults to the company mantra, the Novo Nordisk Way. So the Novo Nordisk Way is the basic thinking of our founders and key elements linked to how we treat each other, how we collaborate, and that's about being open and honest.

It's all about being accountable. This sounds almost like a cult, a religious movement, and not so much a pharmaceutical firm. I think the values are based on ordinary human decent values. You appreciate you're not sounding very much like an American CEO right now. Well, I think I'm very grounded as an individual. My upbringing has given me a lot of, say, groundness. And in Denmark, chief executives are expected to be grounded. In Denmark, it's very unrespectable to flash their money.

Rich people in Denmark, they tend to buy cheaper cars in order to stay out of trouble. So the CEO of Nordisk, if he's driving around Copenhagen in a Ferrari or a limousine, how does that play? Poorly. But the other way around, if he was driving around in a cheap car, that would be a very good thing for him. Oh, I like his driving such a car. He's a true Dane.

But for all of Novo Nordisk's Danish high-mindedness, there is a growing chorus of complaint in America. Stop ripping us off. As an avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders may find plenty to like about Denmark. But at a Senate hearing in September, Sanders excoriated Jorgensen over allegations of price gouging. The CEO told the committee what he told us. The benefits of Novo's drugs to global health will ultimately save trillions of dollars. And if anything is to blame for the high prices, it's the fractured U.S. health care system. What is the response to the skeptical American that says, come on, this is big pharma, this pricing is predatory,

they're making money off people with health problems. This is not utopia. This is not utopia, this is just another big greedy business. Of course it's greedy. You have to compete in the world as it is, and I don't think that Novo Nordisk has all these values just to be nice. They have it because it's good business. They're not blind to capitalism. They're not. They're capitalists at heart. You can be a capitalist with great values. And to keep up with the global demand for Novo's drugs,

less than 1% of sales come from inside Denmark, the company is sinking billions into new plants worldwide. And just a few miles down the road from the cranes in the Danish countryside sits this quintessential Scandinavian institution. Half boarding school, half summer camp. And state subsidized, of course. It's a health facility for the small portion of Danes who are diagnosed with obesity. Recently, enrollment has declined by almost half. And some of the empty

beds are being filled by, get this, newly recruited Novo employees as they try to find permanent housing. That's a way we can gain a little money. Now we have less students. Bit of an irony, right? Yeah, it is. Lars Jorgensen has been a therapist and life coach here for 20 years. When you heard these drugs were coming on the market from Denmark, did you think, oh boy, this could impact us? Yes, we did. So if somebody says, I'm just going to take these anti-obesity drugs rather than come here, what would you tell them? I would tell them to think about what made you eat too much in the first place.

What was that about? Why you need to take medicine? And for some people, it would be a perfect solution, no doubt about that. But for many people, it will not be, because they still have the problem that obesity is just a symptom. That this goes way beyond what the scale says. Exactly. On a more macro level, Novo Nordisk's runaway success is beginning to shrink entire sectors of the global economy. Fast food, big box stores, even Krispy Kreme.

They're already tightening their belts in a universe where people are less hungry. Still, there are competitors and counterfeits out there. And Chinese companies are already in clinical trials for generics. But for now, the world's weight surplus remains the Danes' and Peter Lund Madsen's economic surplus. Do you own Novo Nordisk stock? Yes, I have for many years, like many other people in Denmark. How are you feeling about your investment? Everybody has the feeling that this will go on forever. And they are very, small hot coffee, and more.

Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Our last minute is a note on Election Day 160 years ago. In 1864, the Civil War wasn't going well, and everyone knew Abraham Lincoln would not be re-elected. So Lincoln wrote a memo, folded it closed, sealed it, and everyone knew Abraham Lincoln would not be re-elected. So Lincoln wrote a memo, folded it closed, sealed it, and made his cabinet sign the back. None of them knew what they were endorsing. The memo reads in part,

It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the president-elect as to save the union between the election and the inauguration. Lincoln was re-elected, so it was never necessary to open his secret, solemn vow to a peaceful transfer of power, even while the nation was at war with itself. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.