Raphael Stevens

The long-running U.S. shortage of Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster weight loss injection Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic is resolved after more than two years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.
The FDA’s decision will threaten the ability of compounding pharmacies to make far cheaper, unbranded versions of the injections over the next few months, which caused shares of Hims & Hers Health to plunge.
The FDA determined that Novo Nordisk’s supply and manufacturing capacity for semaglutide injections can now meet the current and projected demand in the U.S.

Boxes of Ozempic and Wegovy made by Novo Nordisk are seen at a pharmacy.
Hollie Adams | Reuters

The long-running U.S. shortage of Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster weight loss injection Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic is resolved after more than two years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday. 
The FDA’s decision will threaten the ability of compounding pharmacies to make far cheaper, unbranded versions of the injections over the next few months. Many patients relied on unapproved versions of Wegovy and Ozempic since compounding pharmacies are allowed to make versions of branded medications in short supply. 

Novo Nordisk’s stock closed about 5% higher on Friday. Meanwhile, shares of Hims & Hers, a telehealth company offering compounded Wegovy and Ozempic, fell more than 25%.
The active ingredient in both of Novo Nordisk’s injectable drugs, semaglutide, has been in shortage in the U.S. since 2022 after demand skyrocketed. That has forced Novo Nordisk and its rival Eli Lilly to invest heavily to expand their manufacturing footprints for their respective weight loss and diabetes drugs — and it may be paying off. 
The FDA determined that Novo Nordisk’s supply and manufacturing capacity for semaglutide injections can now meet the current and projected demand in the U.S. Still, the agency noted that patients and prescribers may still see “intermittent and limited localized supply disruptions” as products move through the supply chain to pharmacies. 
“We are pleased the FDA has declared that supply of the only real, FDA-approved semaglutide medicines is resolved,” Dave Moore, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president of U.S. operations and global business development, said in a statement.
He added that “no one should have to compromise their health due to misinformation and reach for fake or illegitimate knockoff drugs that pose significant safety risks to patients.”

The FDA’s announcement comes just months after the agency declared the shortage of tirzepatide — the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s weight loss injection Zepbound and diabetes counterpart Mounjaro — was over. 
The FDA’s decision on Friday could better position Novo Nordisk to compete with Eli Lilly in the booming weight loss drug market, which some analysts say could be worth more than $150 billion annually after 2030. 

Threat to compounded medications

The agency’s decision, based on a comprehensive analysis, essentially marks the end of a period where compounding pharmacies could make, distribute or dispense unapproved versions of semaglutide without facing repercussions for violations related to the treatment’s shortage status.
Compounding pharmacies must stop making compounded versions of semaglutide in the next 60 to 90 days, depending on the type of facility, the agency said. That transition period will likely give patients time to switch to the branded versions of the medications. 
But, in compliance with FDA rules, compounders can still make alternative versions of the drugs if they modify doses, add other ingredients or change the method of giving the treatment to meet a specific patient’s needs. 
Some patients rely on compounded versions because they do not have insurance coverage for Novo Nordisk’s drugs and cannot afford their hefty price tags of roughly $1,000 a month. While Ozempic is covered by most health plans, weight loss drugs such as Wegovy are not currently covered by Medicare and other insurance.

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UnitedHealthcare is in hot water again as the insurance giant grapples with a reported government investigation of its Medicare billing practices, pursues employee buyouts and potential layoffs and faces sharp criticism from billionaire Bill Ackman.
It extends a tumultuous period for its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, marked by the killing of a top executive, a costly cyberattack against its subsidiary and high medical costs.
UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S., and UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private insurer. 

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Down Jones Industrial Average stock market index listed company UnitedHealthcare is shown in Cypress, California April 13, 2016. 
Mike Blake | Reuters

UnitedHealthcare is in hot water again as the insurance giant grapples with a reported government investigation of its Medicare billing practices, pursues employee buyouts and potential layoffs, and clashes publicly with billionaire Bill Ackman.
Those developments in recent days extend a tumultuous past year for its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, marked by the killing of a top executive, a costly cyberattack against its subsidiary and high medical costs in its insurance arm. UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S. based on revenue and its more than $420 billion market cap, and UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private insurer. 

Shares of UnitedHealth Group have tumbled more than 20% over the last three months.
The stock also closed 7% lower on Friday following a report about the probe, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Department of Justice has launched a civil fraud investigation in recent months into UnitedHealth’s billing practices for its Medicare Advantage plans, according to the newspaper.
The probe specifically examines whether diagnoses were routinely made to trigger extra payments in those plans, including at physician groups the insurer owns, the Journal said. It comes after a series of articles from the newspaper last year, which reported that Medicare paid UnitedHealth billions of dollars for questionable diagnoses. 
Medicare Advantage plans are offered by private insurers who are paid a set rate by the government to manage health care for seniors looking for extra benefits not covered in traditional Medicare. Those plans have been a source of high medical costs across the broader insurance industry over the last year.  
In a statement, UnitedHealth called the Journal’s reporting “misinformation” and said the company consistently performs at the industry’s “highest levels” when it comes to government compliance reviews of Medicare Advantage plans

“Any suggestion that our practices are fraudulent is outrageous and false,” the company said.
In a research note Friday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Ben Hendrix called the reported investigation an “incremental overhang” but emphasized it will likely be a “lengthy process and unlikely in our view to result in material financial headwinds in the near term.” He pointed to a probe the DOJ launched last year into the company’s subsidiary Optum Rx for potential antitrust violations, which will similarly have an extended timeline before any resolution. 
Reports about the probe came two days after CNBC first reported that UnitedHealthcare is offering buyouts to employees and could pursue layoffs if resignation quotas aren’t met. The move comes as the company tries to cut costs through efforts like leveraging digital technology. 

More CNBC health coverage

And earlier this month, Ackman, one of the world’s most prominent investors, publicly pledged to cover the legal fees for a Texas doctor in a dispute with UnitedHealth Group over her claims that the company pulled her out of an operation to justify a patient’s care.
Ackman, who is CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, later took down a post on X that was critical of the insurer after lawyers for UnitedHealth told him that the doctor’s claims that he had amplified on social media were untrue. Ackman said he has no position in UnitedHealth. 
One of his earlier posts on the dispute called on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the company and suggested that the insurer’s “profitability is massively overstated due to its denial of medically necessary procedures.”
That’s similar to the public blowback the company faced after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December. It unleashed a wave of pent-up anger and resentment toward the insurance industry and renewed calls for reform to prevent denials of care.
UnitedHealth is also still grappling with the fallout from a cyberattack on its subsidiary Change Healthcare, which processes medical claims. The cyberattack compromised the protected health information of around 190 million people, and UnitedHealth has paid out more than $3 billion to providers affected.
UnitedHealth has said it became aware of the cyberattack a year ago to the day Friday.

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Bluebird Bio will sell itself to private equity firms Carlyle and SK Capital for about $30 million.
Bluebird makes three gene therapies: Zynteglo for beta thalassemia, Lyfgenia for sickle cell disease and Skysona for cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy.
The entire gene therapy field is facing tough questions about whether these treatments can become successful businesses.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Bluebird Bio will sell itself to private equity firms Carlyle and SK Capital for about $30 million, the company said Friday, marking the end of the Bluebird’s fall from the one of the buzziest biotech firms to one that was on the cusp of running out of money.
Bluebird’s shareholders will receive $3 per share with the possibility of getting another $6.84 a share if Bluebird’s gene therapies reach $600 million in sales in any 12-month period by the end of 2027. Bluebird shares closed at $7.04 on Thursday. They fell 40% on Friday after the company announced the sale.

For more than thirty years, Bluebird has been at the forefront of creating one-time treatments that promised to cure genetic diseases. At one point, Bluebird’s market cap hovered around $9 billion as investors bought into the idea that the company could find success with its gene therapies. It’s fallen under $41 million after the company faced several scientific setbacks, separated its cancer work into another company and fell into financial despair.
The turning point came in 2018, when Bluebird flagged that a patient who received its gene therapy for sickle-cell disease developed cancer. Bluebird concluded its treatment didn’t cause the condition, but the revelation started a series of questions surrounding the safety of its DNA-altering treatments.
Bluebird also faced pushback from European payers after pricing its gene therapy for blood disorder beta thalassemia, called Zynteglo, at $1.8 million per patient. The company withdrew the treatment from Europe in 2021, just two years after it was approved there. Bluebird said it would instead focus on the U.S., where it was readying for the approval of Zynteglo for beta thalassemia, Lyfgenia for sickle cell disease, as well as another therapy Skysona for a rare brain disease called cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy.
All three of those gene therapies were approved in recent years, but none of them have been able to ease Bluebird’s financial woes. The company had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Offloading Bluebird’s cancer treatments into new company 2Seventy Bio also eliminated an important source of revenue.
At last update in November, Bluebird said its cash would fund the company’s operations into the first quarter of this year. The sale marks a stark reversal of Bluebird’s past performance. The upfront price of about $30 million is a fraction of the $80 million Bluebird’s former Chief Executive Officer Nick Leschly made from selling the company’s stock during his time there.

And it’s at odds with the transformative results that most patients see with the company’s treatments. This reporter has spoken to patients who were desperate for the chance to receive Zynteglo, as well as a then-10-year-old girl who felt fortunate to become the first person in the U.S. to receive the treatment after it was approved.The entire field is facing tough questions right now about whether companies can translate the promise of one-time treatments for rare diseases into viable businesses. Vertex’s competing gene therapy for sickle cell disease, Casgevy, has seen a similarly slow launch. Pfizer on Thursday announced it would stop selling a gene therapy for hemophilia that was approved only one year ago, citing weak demand.
Bluebird’s treatments could still change many lives. They just weren’t enough to change the company’s fate. More

The Yankees announced Friday that players can now grow “well-groomed beards.”
Since the 1970s, the team had forbidden long hair and facial hair other than mustaches.
The policy had received criticism for decades by players and fans.

Anthony Volpe, Jasson Domínguez and Paul Goldschmidt of the New York Yankees talk during spring training at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida, on Feb. 19, 2025.
New York Yankees | Getty Images

Start spreading the news: For the first time in nearly 50 years, the New York Yankees are allowing players to grow beards.
In a statement Friday, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner said he spoke to former and current players about the long-standing policy preventing most facial hair and has decided the team will now permit “well-groomed beards.”

“These most recent conversations are an extension of ongoing internal dialogue that dates back several years,” Steinbrenner wrote. “It is the appropriate time to move beyond the familiar comfort of our former policy.”
The news comes days after pitcher Devin Williams, whom the Yankees acquired from the Milwaukee Brewers during the offseason, sported some forbidden facial hair in an official team photo. Williams previously maintained a beard during his time with the Brewers.
The Yankees’ facial hair policy was first implemented by George Steinbrenner, the former Yankees owner and father of Hal Steinbrenner, in the 1970s. The policy banned any facial hair other than mustaches, with exceptions for religious reasons, and scalp hair below the collar for players, coaches and male executives.
George Steinbrenner, who died in 2010, justified the rule as a way of instilling discipline in the team, reportedly telling The New York Times in 1978 that he wanted to “to develop pride in the players as Yankees.”
Since then, all players have abided by the policy, though not without some resistance. Famously, Yankees captain Don Mattingly was benched in 1991 for refusing to get a haircut, an incident mocked on a 1992 episode of “The Simpsons.” Former Yankee Andrew McCutchen said in 2020 that it would have been difficult for him to join the team when he still had dreadlocks, which he wore during the early years of his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and called on the franchise to change the rule.

The tradition has also turned some prospective Yankees away. General manager Brian Cashman said in 2013 that he ruled out trading for relief pitcher Brian Wilson because Wilson refused to shave his beard. Pitcher David Price said in 2013 that he did not want to play for the Yankees due to the policy.
Many past and present players got rid of their beards when they joined the Yankees from another team, including Gerrit Cole, Johnny Damon and current offseason acquisitions Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger. More

IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond expects $1.2 billion in box office receipts in 2025, fueled by a strong domestic movie slate and improved ticket sales in China.
Gelfond pointed to several blockbuster titles slated for release in the next 10 months, including a new “Mission Impossible,” a live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” film, another “Jurassic Park” installment, a sequel to “Zootopia” and a third “Avatar” release.
Aiding IMAX’s lofty box office goals is the Chinese title “Ne Zha 2,” which has already garnered $1.6 billion globally, $135 million of which came from IMAX screenings.

General atmosphere during an IMAX private screening for the movie “First Man” at an AMC theater in New York City on Oct. 10, 2018.
Lars Niki | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

An “embarrassment of riches” at the box office could fuel a $1.2 billion year for IMAX, CEO Rich Gelfond told CNBC on Friday.
That volume would mark the best box office haul for the company, which specializes in high-resolution cameras, film formats, projectors and theaters.

“I think it’s going to be a very strong year,” Gelfond said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “The first thing that drives that is the slate.”
Gelfond pointed to several blockbuster titles slated for release in the next 10 months, including a new “Mission Impossible,” a live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” film, another “Jurassic Park” installment, a sequel to “Zootopia” and a third “Avatar” release.

Hollywood production issues led to fewer theatrical releases and smaller ticket sales in 2024, with box office receipts down 3.4% from 2023 to $8.74 billion. Already, the 2025 slate appears more robust, with more titles and bigger franchise films.
Aiding IMAX’s lofty box office goals is the Chinese title “Ne Zha 2,” which has already garnered $1.6 billion globally. It is the first film to have topped $1 billion in a single country. Gelfond noted that IMAX accounted for $135 million of the film’s total box office.
“We’ve done more box office in China in the first six weeks of this year than we did the whole year last year,” he said.

He added that “Ne Zha 2” is doing “like $100 million a day,” and that IMAX has accounted for around 13% of the film’s box office receipts.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

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Sales of previously-owned homes fell 4.9% in January from the prior month, according to the National Association of Realtors.
There were 1.18 million homes for sale at the end of January, an increase of 3.5% from December and 17% from January 2024.
The median price of a home sold in January was $396,900, up 4.8% from the year before and the highest price ever for the month of January.

A “For Sale” sign on a house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. 
Joe Lamberti | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The U.S. housing market continues to weaken, as potential buyers face stubbornly high mortgage rates, elevated prices and limited supply of listings.
Sales of previously owned homes fell 4.9% in January from the prior month to 4.08 million units on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors. Analysts were expecting a 2.6% decline.

Sales were 2% higher than January 2024, but are still running at a roughly 15-year low.
This read is based on closings, so contracts likely signed in November and December when mortgage rates came down from over 7% to the 6% range.
“Mortgage rates have refused to budge for several months despite multiple rounds of short-term interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the NAR. “When combined with elevated home prices, housing affordability remains a major challenge.”
There were 1.18 million homes for sale at the end of January, an increase of 3.5% from December and 17% from January 2024. Although inventory is gaining, it is still at a 3.5-month supply at the current sales pace. A six-month supply is considered balanced between buyer and seller.
The average home for sale last month spent 41 days on the market. That is the longest since January 2020, pre-Covid.

Tight supply continues to pressure prices. The median price of a home sold in January was $396,900, up 4.8% from the year before and the highest price ever for the month of January. All four regions tracked by NAR saw price gains. About 15% of homes sold above list price, virtually unchanged from 16% in both the pervious month and the year-earlier period.
“More housing supply allows strongly qualified buyers to enter the market,” Yun added. “But for many consumers, both increased inventory and lower mortgage rates are necessary for them to purchase a different home or become first-time homeowners.”
All-cash offers made up 29% of sales, which is historically high but down from 32% the year before. First-time buyers are still struggling, accounting for 28% of sales. That share is unchanged from a year ago, but is well below historical averages of about 40%.
Home sales are faring significantly better at higher price points and falling at lower price points. For example, sales of homes priced between $100,000 and $250,000 dropped 1.2% year over year, while homes priced over $1 million rose nearly 27% from the year before.
Realtors are reporting that buyer traffic in January was weak.
“Realtors are putting more signs up, but the buyers are not coming,” said Yun.

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