Horrendous Kwik-pen experience - from a vial/autoject user

Hi all,

I'm a US user and noticed that EL may start selling KwikPens here so I wanted to share my experience using one for the first time today

I had been on the auto-injector pens through my insurance for about a year, ~5 months ago I switched to EL vials for a month and then compounded vials since then. Prior to Zepbound, I used Ozempic with it's multi-dose pens for a little while and never had any issues.

I recently travelled abroad and bought 2 Kiwkpens - it was slightly more expensive than my compound but I thought it would be good to keep around when I'm travelling, based on my experience with Ozempic I assumed the pen mechanism was the same and it's much more convenient than walking around with vials and syringes.

Holiday season is here and I have a bunch of travel this month, so I decided to use my KiwkPen for the first time today. I followed all the instructions included, and again, as an experienced injector did not anticipate issues.

This pen was an absolute mess. You turn the dial in the back until is pops out to the dose amount, and then you push the back part in exactly like a syringe plunger. Imagine a prefilled syringe but it's just a big tub, 3x the diameter of a regular insulin syringe so it's incredibly clunky to hold, and then you're trying to hold it steady and push it in with one hand. On top of that, due to the "screwing" mechanism, the "plunger" part of the pen doesn't move as smoothly as it should. the whole thing was so unsteady the pen actually came out of me and I had to reinject (I used the same needle which was not ideal, but the medication was coming out so I knew I would lose a bunch if I tried to switch needles).

So yeah, if you're planning to switch to the Kwikpen hoping for a more seamless experience than vials, I will caution you against that. Now I understand that was my first time and I will get better with practice, but if EL is planning to sell this to folks for ~$450 a pop they really need to step up their game. Ozempic's autoinjector is so seamless that there's simply no need for this to be so clunky and not user friendly.