Friday, Jul 24, 2026 The claims desk. Receipts included. POWERED BY LENZ ↗
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HEALTH

The Claim

Thousands of people have reported severe side effects from Ozempic (semaglutide), including blindness and organ damage.

Verified by Lenz ·

The Short Version

The claim is broadly supported as a description of adverse-event reporting, not confirmed causation. Safety databases contain thousands of serious semaglutide reports, and those reports include blindness or vision-loss terms as well as kidney and liver injury. The main caveat is that these are reported events, often across semaglutide products, and do not by themselves prove Ozempic caused each case.

Caveats

  • Spontaneous-report systems such as FAERS can include unverified, incomplete, or duplicate reports and do not prove causation.
  • Some evidence pools semaglutide products broadly, including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus, so brand-specific burden can be overstated.
  • “Organ damage” is a broad label; the evidence more specifically supports reported kidney injury, renal failure, and liver injury rather than a quantified total for all organ damage.

The Receipts

  1. PRAC concludes eye condition NAION is a very rare side effect of semaglutide-containing medicines Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy

    European Medicines Agency

  2. Compounded GLP-1 Drugs and Patient Adverse Events

    Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding

  3. Semaglutide NAION risk_2025-06_EMA communication

    Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (AIFA) / EMA PDF

  4. The unseen risk of Ozempic: NAION and vision damage

    PubMed Central

  5. Association between various dosage forms of semaglutide and ocular adverse events: a pharmacovigilance analysis based on FAERS

    PubMed Central (PMC)

  6. Adverse events in different administration routes of semaglutide

    Frontiers in Pharmacology

  7. July - September 2023 | Potential Signals of Serious Risks/New Safety Information Identified by the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS)

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration

  8. FDA alerts health care providers, compounders and patients of dosing errors associated with compounded semaglutide products

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration

  9. An Assessment of Semaglutide Safety Based on Real World Data

    PubMed Central

  10. Is Semaglutide Linked to NAION? A Case Report on a Rare Ocular Condition and a Review of the Literature

    MDPI

+ 24 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

OzempicSemaglutide

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