WADA Keeps Ozempic and Wegovy Legal for Olympic Sport Through 2027 as Far-Left Activists Call the Drugs 'Fascist'

The World Anti-Doping Agency's Executive Committee met in Belgrade, Serbia, and confirmed that GLP-1 receptor agonists, including semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro), will not be added to the 2027 Prohibited List, according to The Barbell Spin and The Independent. The drugs stay on WADA's Monitoring Program instead, meaning testers will keep tracking usage patterns without punishing athletes who take them.

Semaglutide has been on that monitoring list since 2024. Tirzepatide was added this year. WADA's senior director for science and medicine, Professor Olivier Rabin, said the agency "carefully" weighed a ban but concluded "there is not enough evidence available for us to conclude with confidence that the substances meet the criteria needed for inclusion," per The Independent. WADA bans a substance only if it meets two of three tests: performance enhancement, health risk, or violating the spirit of sport.

That evidence gap is what's driving the research. A Copenhagen trial led by Morten Hostrup is tracking roughly 40 high-level endurance runners over four and a half months, measuring 5K times, muscle mass and mental state, with results expected in about a year, according to The Washington Post's reporting carried by The Oakland Press. Separately, a Loughborough University survey of 114 sports medicine physicians across 38 countries and 93 sports found 12% knew of elite athletes using GLP-1s without a medical need, and 44% supported eventually banning the drugs in sport, according to Gran Fondo Daily News.

Serena Williams gave the debate a face. The 23-time Grand Slam champion, who returned to tennis this year after a four-year layoff, said on "The Oprah Podcast" that she wished she'd started GLP-1s while still competing, crediting the drug with 34 pounds of weight loss and less joint stress, per The Washington Post. Oliver Catlin, president of the Banned Substances Control Group, called that "the actual words of an athlete" describing performance benefits firsthand. University of Toronto endocrinologist Daniel Drucker, who helped discover GLP-1s, countered there's "insufficient data to come down on either side." WADA will revisit the question at its September 2027 meeting, with any rule change taking effect in January 2028, per The Independent.

Meanwhile, the far left calls the same drugs 'fascist'

While WADA was treating GLP-1s as an open scientific question, speakers at the DSA-backed Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, which drew more than 3,000 attendees, were calling them a weapon of political violence, according to Breitbart, which cited reporting from the California Post and New York Post.

Atlanta activist Da'Shaun L. Harrison, author of the 2022 book "Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness," told a panel titled "Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State" that "the political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic" because society is "fixated on genociding fat people." Harrison argued the drugs exist "to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from and punished." Harrison, described by the California Post as a "self-described 'ungendered' author and 'trans theorist'," has also appeared in an ACLU YouTube video arguing anti-fatness is anti-Blackness, and the California Post noted his own Instagram photos show a heavier physique than the drugs' typical users.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of "Health Communism," told the same panel that "fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism" and that activists must "give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists." Breitbart noted the irony that while body weight wasn't treated as a health concern on stage, conference organizers required all attendees to wear masks covering the nose and mouth.

Body-positivity advocates have long argued that weight-loss culture can stigmatize people in larger bodies and that GLP-1 side effects, including nausea, fatigue and muscle loss, deserve more scrutiny before the drugs become a default social expectation. Calling FDA-approved medication a fascist genocide tool is a different claim entirely. Clinical data cited by Breitbart credits GLP-1s with lowering the risk of death from heart attack or stroke in high-risk patients, and the Trump administration has pushed to make the drugs more affordable, according to the same report.

A separate fairness fight, same week, in Washington

A different argument over fairness in sport played out on Capitol Hill, where the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "Standing Up for Women in Sports," according to Fox News. ICONS co-founder Kim Jones, former athlete Carly Smolak and attorney William Bock III testified about biological males competing in women's categories. Democrats didn't call a witness of their own, and Ranking Member Dick Durbin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar left within the first hour. Durbin declined to question the witnesses and said the hearing ignored issues like affordability and children's cellphone use, while also raising concern that enforcing sex-based categories could lead to invasive physical inspections. Jones called the Democrats' absence "misogynistic" and "incredibly disappointing."

Both fights center on the same question: who gets to define fairness, and on whose evidence. WADA's next formal review comes in September 2027. Until then, semaglutide and tirzepatide stay legal for every athlete with a prescription, monitored but not banned, while the science catches up to the politics on both sides of the debate.