Fake GLP-1 jabs: no more advertising on the internet
25 June 2026
Novo Nordisk and others v BT and others [2026] EWHC 1553 (CH)
News just in: The UK’s drug regulator has approved a daily pill version of the obesity drug semaglutide (Wegovy) for weight loss.
The tablet form of Wegovy, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is the first glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist pill to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for weight loss and weight management in the UK. (BMJ newsletter, 26 June 2026)
This short judgement follows an application for a website blocking order, or more accurately, an application to vary and extend an existing order made by Mellor J dated 2 October 2025. For the sake of clarity I will first summarise the earlier ruling made by Mellor J ([2026] EWHC 1094 (Ch)). The key takeaway from these two judgments is that this is the first time that the courts have used the website blocking system, which used to be aimed exclusively at copyright piracy, in the field of public health.
Here the judge upheld Novo Nordisk’s application for a website-blocking order against six major UK ISPs (BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media), directed at four target websites — Viogen Pharma, Pharma-Labs, Leo Labs and The Steroid Supplier — which were advertising, offering and selling counterfeit and unlicensed semaglutide to UK consumers, branded as or referencing Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Victoza and Saxenda. The evidence established a proliferation of “falsified” products in three forms: outright counterfeits bearing NN branding, unlicensed third-party versions marketed under the INN, and products substituting an entirely different substance such as insulin. Sample purchases all showed impurities, and NN adduced FDA and WHO data linking falsified semaglutide to hundreds of hospitalisations and deaths globally. The MHRA had separately tried and failed to have the sites taken down and supported the application.
Mellor J observed that this was the first such application concerning counterfeit and unlicensed prescription-only medicines. Advertising or offering unlicensed prescription-only medicines is itself a criminal offence under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012. The question was whether NN had standing to enforce breaches of the Regulations or restrain repeated offences under them.
Jurisdictional basis
The judge applied the established Cartier framework (Court of Appeal and Supreme Court), holding that the four threshold requirements were satisfied: the ISPs were “intermediaries”; the website operators were infringing NN’s rights; UK consumers used the ISPs’ services to reach the sites and conclude purchases; and the ISPs had actual knowledge via service of the evidence. Importantly, he confirmed that the Cartier jurisdiction is not confined to IP infringement but rests on the court’s equitable protective jurisdiction over facilitators “unwittingly mixed up” in a legal wrong — civil or criminal, per Ashworth Hospital Authority v MGN Ltd. Any form of civil or criminal wrongdoing would suffice, because the jurisdiction derives from ordinary principles of equity, which draws no relevant distinction between civil and criminal wrongdoing.
Mellor J was satisfied NN had standing here — significantly influenced by the MHRA’s active support for the application.He grounded this within the wider modern law of injunctions, drawing on his own earlier review in COPA v Wright [2024] EWHC 3315 (Ch) and the Supreme Court’s Wolverhampton City Council v London Gypsies and Travellers [2024] 2 WLR 45 and the Privy Council’s Convoy Collateral v Broad Idea International [2023] AC 389: the equitable jurisdiction to grant injunctions is broad, unconfined by rigid categorisation, and can evolve to meet new circumstances provided the exercise remains principled.
As Johnson J observed in the later application, the court was “not solely concerned with infringements of IP rights which engage the applicants’ private interests, but also with wrongdoing which involves regulatory breaches and criminal conduct.” [para 8]
The wrongdoing
NN did not rely on patent infringement (despite holding SPC protection over semaglutide until 2031) but on:
- Trade mark infringement — straightforward, for outright counterfeits bearing the NN marks.
- Passing off, including “extended” passing off (per Glaxo Wellcome v Sandoz) — since only NN held UK marketing authorisation for semaglutide, sales of unlicensed product as “semaglutide” falsely represented equivalence, regulatory compliance, and class membership among authorised traders.
- Criminal offences under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 — breaches of regs 17/18 (unauthorised dealing), 46 (unauthorised medicinal products), 214/220 (sale without prescription), and 279/284 (unlawful advertising), each separately criminalised under regs 34, 47, 255 and 303.
Proportionality
Applying the Cartier/Nintendo/EMI proportionality criteria (necessity, effectiveness, dissuasiveness, cost, avoidance of over-blocking, fair balance, safeguards), the judge found decisively in NN’s favour: the sites were “profiting from infringement on an industrial scale,” posed serious public health risks, and blocking had a strong track record (averaging 98% reduction in UK visitors in comparable cases). No legitimate trade was at risk of over-blocking, as no lawful products were found on any target site.
Outcome and significance
The order was granted. The judgment is the first to extend the website-blocking jurisdiction beyond IP piracy/counterfeiting into public-health-driven enforcement against unlicensed medicine sales, confirming that breach of public-law/criminal regulatory provisions — not just civil IP rights — can found this equitable relief where a facilitator (the ISP) is innocently “mixed up” in the wrong. A postscript records that the order proved operationally effective.
Why the later hearing? The applicants sought a further variation before Adam Johnson J. This was to allow what the Applicants call “dynamic blocking”. The idea behind this was that the Applicants should not need to keep returning to Court as further potential Target Websites are identified. Instead, they should be entitled to self-certify against a number of designated criteria, set out in a confidential schedule. If the relevant criteria are met, then the Applicants will be able to notify the ISPs that the infringing websites are also proscribed as Target Websites, and thus require the ISPs to take steps to block them. The ISPs – the direct Respondents to the proposed Order – have been consulted about the structure and do not oppose it, on the basis that their costs of compliance are met.
“this is an area where creativity is needed in order to target wrongdoing effectively. That is because it is fast moving, and the wrongdoers are themselves creative. The evidence before me is that Mellor J’s Order has been effective, in that traffic from UK consumers to all but one of the four initial Target Websites has massively declined. However, there have been attempts to circumvent the block by registration of “mirror domain” names, and moreover the Applicants have become aware of over 130 other websites that promote counterfeit and unlicensed semaglutide and cagrilintide products to UK consumers. The law is not afraid of adapting to new challenges, and there are many examples of that in the cases, perhaps the most recent of which is the development of the so-called “newcomer” injunction, the propriety of which was expressly affirmed by the Supreme Court in Wolverhamption City Council and ors v. London Gypsies and Travellers and ors [2023] UKSC 47.” [para 5]
The sale of unlicensed prescription-only medicinal products, continues the judge, can result in serious harm. Much of the activity has been linked to organised crime gangs, operating anonymously from abroad, typically using intermediary routing services but targeting UK consumers. Their activities involve regulatory offences under the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 (the “2012 Regulations”), but in a manner which the relevant regulator – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (“MHRA”) – has in practice found very difficult to police.
Legal Framework
Part of the picture emerges from assimilated EU case law of the CJEU, interpreting Article 11 of Directive 2004/48/EC and Article 15(1) of Directive 2000/31/EC. These are the sources of EU law transposed by s.97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and which define the limits of injunctive relief available against intermediaries in respect of infringements of intellectual property rights. The case law makes it clear that the jurisdiction extends beyond the making of orders directed at bringing to an end existing infringements, and encompasses orders aimed at preventing future infringements (see L’Oreal SA v. eBay International AG, C-324/09, EU:C:2011:474 [2011] ECR I 0000 at [131]), at least if the future wrongdoing is of the same or an equivalent kind (see Glawisching-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Ltd, C-18/18, EU-C-2019:821 at [38]-[47]).
Mellor J justified his original order on the basis of two types of wrongdoing: infringement of the Applicants’ private rights, arising from infringement of registered trade marks and passing off (see his Judgment at [25]-[30]); but also criminal wrongdoing arising from breaches of the 2012 Regulations, specifically (1) selling unauthorised medicinal products without any marketing authorisation; (2) selling prescription-only medicines otherwise than in accordance with a prescription; (3) selling prescription-only medicines without being authorised to dispense them; and (4) advertising such products for sale without proper authorisation.
However, the difficulty before Johnson J was this. Under the proposed dynamic blocking criteria the position was slightly different. The Applicants’ private rights might not have been engaged. Instead, the relevant wrongdoing would comprise only regulatory breaches and thus criminal wrongdoing. The principle question was the propriety of an Order which carried with it the potential for a party whose private rights are not directly infringed, to act as a form of private enforcement agency targeting regulatory breaches, and moreover doing so under a confidential mechanism which is not visible to the ultimate wrongdoers.
Be that as it may, the judge was satisifed that the Order sought was sound in principle and justified on the facts. It is now well settled that this jurisdiction is not limited to cases where the underlying wrongdoing takes the form of a civil wrong, which infringes the private law rights of the applicant. It is also exercisable where the nature of the wrongdoing is criminal in character. That was made clear in Ashworth Hospital Authority v. MGN Limited [2002] UKHL 29, [2002] 1 WLR 2033. There, a hospital employee had provided information about the notorious murderer, Ian Brady, to an intermediary, who in turn had provided the information to a newspaper. The Court ordered the newspaper to provide a witness statement indicating how it had come to be in possession of the information, and identifying the employee. One question which arose was whether it was a prerequisite to any order that the hospital should intend to bring its own civil claim against the employee – in other words, was the power to require provision of information limited to cases where it was needed in order to allow the applicant to seek redress for a civil wrong. The House of Lords said no. At [2002] 1 WLR p. 2048D-E, Lord Woolf said:
“If the law has developed so as to enable, in the appropriate circumstances, the wrongdoer to be identified if he has committed a civil wrong, I can find no justification for not requiring the wrongdoer to be identified if he has committed a criminal wrong … If the victim of the wrongdoing is content that the wrongdoer should be prosecuted by the appropriate prosecuting authority, I cannot see any objection to his obtaining the identity of the wrongdoer to enable that to happen.”
Johnson J was satisfied that these principles provide an adequate platform for the relief sought by the Applicants, even as regards those possible permutations of the dynamic blocking criteria under which no civil wrongdoing is relied on. He accepted that, in practice, such permutations may be rare; but all the same, it seemed “important to examine the issue of principle in order to be satisfied that the order can properly be made.”
