alt Hacker NewsI agree needles can alleviate the Ozempic shortage, though only if Novo Nordisk decides to sell Ozempic without pens. But not including pens will hardly reduce the price of Ozempic anyway, because pens cost basically nothing (estimated USD 2.83 for a month) compared to the full price of the drug.
The marginal cost to produce the few milligrams of the drug that goes into the pens is much much less than $2.83; it's on the order of cents. Plus, scaling up manufacturing of the drug is easier than scaling up manufacturing of the auto-injectors (which have a decent number of parts in them). The auto-injectors really are the bottleneck, and manufacturing of them so far has not been able to be ramped up quickly enough.