Zepbound Pen Shortage Has Patients Clamoring for Vials of Drug

Patients struggling to get their hands on the hard-to-find weight-loss shot Zepbound have a solution for drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co.: Release the vials.

Zepbound isn’t in short supply because there’s a lack of medicine — but rather the pre-filled pens that patients use to inject the right dose of the drug. Making that device requires “some of the most complex” production systems “on the planet,” Lilly Chief Executive Officer David Ricks said in an interview with Bloomberg News last August.

But there’s another way to administer the drug: Lilly could ditch the pen and sell Zepbound in vials. That would require patients to fill a syringe on their ...