“Provided her the link and sold her vials and provided recommended dosages.”
An adverse event report sent to the FDA in September, describing a licensed nurse
The report runs to a few lines. A 49-year-old patient. A licensed nurse who “convinced” her to buy an experimental weight-loss drug from an online peptide vendor, sent the link, sold the vials and set the doses. Then severe dehydration, malnutrition and cardiac arrest. It reached the Food and Drug Administration in September, two months after another report described a 41-year-old woman who went into cardiac arrest after getting the same drug “from an unreliable source.”
CBS News obtained both reports through a records request and published them Tuesday morning, with the caveats they need: the FDA redacted the details, nobody has verified them, and nothing shows the drug caused either death. What that account does not mention is the agency’s own paper trail. Before either report arrived, the FDA had sent 14 warning letters to companies selling this drug, and most of the recipients kept selling. That record is the part of this story the government controls.
A Drug Nobody May Legally Sell
The drug is retatrutide, “Reta” to the people who inject it, and it belongs to Eli Lilly. In two late-stage trials reported in July, patients lost up to 22.6 percent of their body weight in 80 weeks, and Lilly plans to ask the FDA for approval in the first quarter of 2027. Until that application is filed, reviewed and granted, there is no legal retail version at all. No pharmacy can dispense it, and it sits on no list that would let a compounding pharmacy mix it, which was the route that kept cheaper copies of Ozempic on shelves during the shortage. Every vial outside a Lilly trial is bootleg by definition, usually sold under a label saying it is for laboratory research and not for human consumption.
The Patient in the Report
Read the September report the way the patient would have lived it. Someone with a nursing license told her the drug was worth trying. The nurse sent a link to a vendor’s website, sold her the vials and told her how much to take. CBS found that some sellers carry “an independent, blue-chip certification that gives them the appearance of legitimacy and the ability to advertise it on social media.” Every signal an ordinary person uses to judge whether a medicine is safe was present, and none of them meant anything. Lilly says it has tested products sold as retatrutide and found “too much, too little, or the wrong active ingredient.” She had no way to know which one she was holding.
Fourteen Letters
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| December 2024 | The FDA sends the first of 14 warning letters to companies selling retatrutide |
| February 2026 | Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells Joe Rogan, “I’m a big fan of peptides” |
| March 31, 2026 | A warning letter to Pink Pony Peptides cites a product listed as “GLP-3 RT” |
| May 2026 | Public Citizen finds 11 of the 14 warned sellers still advertising unapproved peptides and eight still selling retatrutide |
| July 2026 | The first death report reaches the FDA. Agency advisers vote to open six other peptides to compounding. Lilly says it will file for approval in early 2027 |
| September 2026 | The second death report arrives. Poison centers log 862 retatrutide exposures for the quarter |
The enforcement record is public, and Public Citizen assembled it in June. Since December 2024 the agency has issued 14 warning letters to retatrutide sellers; by May, 11 of the 14 were still advertising retatrutide or other unapproved peptides, and eight were still selling retatrutide itself. One letter, sent March 31 to a company doing business as Pink Pony Peptides, cites a product listed as “GLP-3 RT” and gives the firm 15 working days to respond. Meanwhile the injuries climbed. The FDA’s own database held 10 retatrutide reports for all of 2025 and 26 in the first five months of 2026, 11 of them hospitalizations. America’s Poison Centers counted 249 exposures in the first three months of this year, 460 in the next three and 862 in the three months ending in September, close to a 3.5-fold rise in half a year.
The Secretary’s Theory
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a theory about this market, and he has been open about it. “I’m a big fan of peptides,” he told Joe Rogan in February. “I’ve used them myself and with really good effect on a couple of injuries.” His argument is that restrictions push users toward illicit sellers and legal access pulls them back, and in July an FDA advisory panel voted to let pharmacies compound six other peptides, the step he had promoted. Retatrutide is the case that theory cannot reach. It is patented, still in trials and closed to compounders, so loosening the rules for BPC-157 does nothing for someone who wants the drug that takes off a fifth of a person’s weight. For Reta, the only tool the government has until 2027 at the earliest is enforcement, and enforcement has meant a letter.
What the FDA Owes Two Reports
We think the FDA owes the public one sentence about each of these deaths: whether it investigated, and what it found. Asked by CBS, the agency said only, “We review adverse event reports, gathering additional information when needed.” Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School gave the fair reading of that answer: “If the FDA is not aggressively investigating these cases, that’s deeply concerning.” A warning letter that 11 of 14 recipients shrug off is correspondence, and the law gives the agency seizures and injunctions for the day correspondence fails. A nurse selling vials to patients is a matter for a state licensing board right now. Kennedy is entitled to his enthusiasm for peptides, but he runs the department that received these reports, and the first real test of his black-market theory is whether his own regulators will shut down the part of that market no pharmacy can replace.