Eli Lilly Sued 6 Retatrutide Vendors (Here's What To Know)

The Short Version

On August 12, 2026, Eli Lilly filed six civil lawsuits against US businesses it says are selling retatrutide — a med spa, a compounding pharmacy, and four peptide sellers.^[1] No consumer was sued. Nothing about your legal position changed today. What may change, and quickly, is whether your vendor's checkout still works next month.

Three separate things are being blurred together in the coverage of this story, and keeping them apart is most of what you need. A lawsuit is an allegation. A Phase 3 drug is not an approved one. And a filing date is not an approval date. Pin that to the fridge and you will read the next six weeks of headlines correctly.

Every outlet that covered this answered the same question: what happened. Here are the four they left open. Whether your specific vendor was named — there is a lookup table below, with case numbers. Whether you personally are exposed — answered directly, without hedging. What Lilly actually filed, which turns out to be two completely different legal strategies against two kinds of defendant, and which no wire report unpacked. And why the kind of application Lilly plans to file — a Biologics License Application — ties this to a separate fight nobody connected it to.

Who Exactly Did Lilly Sue?

Lilly named six businesses in four federal district courts, all on August 12, 2026. One is a California med spa, one is a licensed compounding pharmacy, and four are peptide sellers. Five of the six are in Texas. The table below is the lookup: if the name you buy from is not on it, your vendor was not named in this round.^[1]

Courts and case numbers from the federal dockets. We read the Striker and Aesthetic Envy complaints directly;^[8][9] the four other suits share Striker's jurisdictional basis and are described here as similar state-law claims rather than assumed identical. Two clerical notes: the Aesthetic Envy complaint's caption reads 2:26-cv-1347, while the docket number of record is 2:26-at-01347; and Lilly's own announcement placed that case in the Northern District of California, but the filed complaint says Eastern District. The filing governs.

The mix is the interesting part, and it is not an accident. Lilly did not sue six interchangeable websites. It sued one clinic that sees patients in person, one pharmacy with a state license to lose, and four sellers on the research-chemical model. As the next section shows, it did not even use the same body of law against them.

The compounding pharmacy is the most pointed inclusion. A licensed pharmacy is regulated, insured, inspected, and answerable to a state board — it is the last kind of business that can shrug off a federal lawsuit and reopen under a new domain. Naming one sends a message to every other pharmacy weighing whether retatrutide is worth it. For the wider context, see the FDA's compounding crackdown.

Five of six being in Texas tells you less than it looks like. It reflects where this slice of the industry has clustered, not a legal weakness in Texas. Companies incorporated overseas are far harder to sue, which is part of why the first wave landed where it did.

What Is Lilly Actually Alleging?

Lilly's public case has four parts: that the defendants sell a drug no regulator has approved; that “research use only” labeling is a fig leaf when the product is plainly sold for people to inject; that buyers are exposed to unverified material from unregulated foreign manufacturers; and that all of this diverts demand from its own approved medicines. None of it has been tested in court, and no defendant has responded.^[1]

The company's chief medical officer, David A. Hyman, M.D., put the safety argument in one line: “What is being sold on the black market is not a medicine – it is entirely unverified, unapproved and not worth the risk.”^[1] Dr. Max Denning, Lilly's associate vice president and therapeutic area lead for global patient safety in cardiometabolic health, was blunter to Reuters: “Every single time that someone takes one of these, they're exposing themselves to a huge amount of risk.”^[2]

Here is the thing no wire report noticed: these are not six copies of one lawsuit. They are two different legal strategies, and which one a defendant got depended on how loudly it advertised.

Read from the two complaints directly.^[8][9] Two pieces of jargon, defined once: an injunction is a court order to stop doing something, and it can bind anyone acting in concert with the defendant. Disgorgement means handing over the profits you made, separately from any damages — the point is that the conduct should not have paid.

The pattern is worth sitting with, because it is a lesson in what actually creates legal exposure. Of the two complaints we read in full, the med spa is the only defendant facing a federal false-advertising claim, the only one that may be ordered to publish a correction saying the drug is unapproved and its prior claims were false, and the only one where Lilly claims a right to have its materials destroyed. The quiet research-peptide sellers, who avoid saying what the product does, got a different and less aggressive body of law pointed at them.

That does not mean silence is safe — eight state-law claims and a demand for profits is not a slap on the wrist. But it tells you which behavior Lilly considers most actionable: making a claim about how well the drug works, while citing Lilly's own trial data to support it.

Take the strongest allegation seriously, because it is strong. A vial sold alongside dosing instructions, before-and-after photos, and a milligram-per-week schedule is not being sold for research. “Research use only” is a phrase that describes material bought by a laboratory. When it appears on a product marketed with a weight-loss claim, it is a disclaimer written for a regulator, not a description written for a customer. The FDA has said the same thing in its own words: it has warned companies selling unapproved drugs “falsely labeled 'for research purposes' or 'not for human consumption'” that were “sold directly to consumers for human use with dosing instructions.”^[5] We are not going to pretend otherwise to be polite to vendors.

Now the other half, said just as plainly. Lilly is not a neutral referee. It has a commercial interest in this market disappearing, it wrote every word of these complaints, and a complaint is designed to be one-sided. Some of what it alleges is documented; some is inference. We separate the two in the quality section below. For how the current rules got written, see the 2026 regulatory picture.

How Can Lilly Sue Over a Drug It Doesn't Sell?

Lilly did not sue anyone for using the word “retatrutide.” There is no trademark claim in the Striker complaint at all. Retatrutide is an international nonproprietary name — the generic scientific name a molecule gets so that every country calls it the same thing — and nobody can own it. This was the sharpest question the peptide community asked in the first hours, and now that the filings are public it has a concrete answer.^[8]

What Lilly filed instead is unfair-competition law: eight claims under the consumer-protection statutes of Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington, plus Texas common-law unfair competition.^[8] These are the laws that govern deceptive commercial conduct. The case is in federal court not because the claims are federal but because the parties live in different states and enough money is at issue.

The injury Lilly claims is its own, and the complaint is unusually candid about it. It describes consumers switching to black-market product “citing illegal sellers' claims of lower cost and perceived superior efficacy as the primary drivers” — note where that puts the blame, on the sellers' marketing rather than on buyers' own arithmetic — and warns this risks “poisoning the well for the future of retatrutide medicines.”^[8] Read that twice, because it is the real theory of the case: the harm Lilly asserts is not only lost sales today but damage to the reputation of a product it has not launched yet. If people come to associate the name with contaminated vials and hospital visits, the eventual approved medicine inherits that.

Lilly's executive vice president Kenneth Custer said the commercial half out loud on an analyst call before any of this was filed: “I think people are eagerly awaiting authentic retatrutide to be available in the market.”^[3] That is a company describing a demand pool it intends to sell into.

Note what this means for how the cases get decided. The question in front of a judge is not “is retatrutide safe” or “should people be allowed to buy it.” It is a narrower commercial question about whether these businesses harmed Lilly through deceptive or unlawful sales. A win for Lilly would not be a scientific finding about the molecule, and a loss would not be a green light for the market. Read any eventual ruling with that in mind.

If I Bought Retatrutide, Am I in Legal Trouble?

No consumer is a defendant in any of these six cases. They are civil lawsuits brought by one private company against six businesses, seeking remedies from those businesses. Buying retatrutide did not make you a party to any of them, and nothing filed on August 12 created a new consequence for a person who has a vial in their refrigerator.^[1]

The wider enforcement picture points the same direction. The FDA's published enforcement actions in this category have been directed at sellers, distributors and marketers — telehealth companies marketing retatrutide, ingredient distributors selling it to compounders, outsourcing facilities repackaging it — rather than at the individuals who bought from them.^[5] That describes where enforcement has gone, not a promise about where it will go, and it is not a statement that buying is lawful. It is not.

Personal importation is a separate question, and here there is a real and ordinary risk worth naming. Product ordered from overseas passes through customs, and customs can seize it. That is the exposure most buyers actually meet: a package that never arrives and a notice in the mail, not a prosecution. Reuters obtained figures from US Customs and Border Protection that put the scale in perspective — more than 690 shipments intercepted in fiscal 2025, containing over 31,000 units of illicit GLP-1 drugs, then more than 1,400 seizures and nearly 90,000 vials in July 2026 alone.^[2] The agency counts those two periods differently, in shipments and units against seizures and vials, so read them as scale rather than a like-for-like ratio. Even so, one month's seizures roughly doubled the entire previous fiscal year's total.

Here is the honest ranking of what you are exposed to, in order of likelihood: losing money on an order that never ships, then having a package seized, then being sold something that is not what the label says. Legal jeopardy for the buyer is not at the top of that list, and medical risk is the one people under-weight most. For the general picture, see the legal status of peptides generally.

None of this is legal advice, and your situation may have specifics we cannot see. If you are a clinician, a pharmacist, or you resold anything to anyone, you are in a different conversation and should talk to a lawyer.

Can Reddit Posts Really Be Used as Evidence?

Yes, and Lilly did exactly that. We opened the complaints: the Striker filing devotes a section headed “Consumers Are Suffering Adverse Effects from Black Market Retatrutide,” names peptide subreddits directly, and cites individual posts by username and title in its footnotes.^[8] The near-identical paragraph appears in the med spa complaint too, which tells you it is standard text Lilly is using across these cases.^[9]

What the complaints actually quote

The complaint's own words: “Online communities, including Reddit forums such as r/Retatrutide and r/Biohacking, demonstrate a thriving black market for illegal retatrutide products and its dangers. Consumers openly discuss purchasing, self-administering, and comparing dosages of retatrutide products obtained from unregulated sources, including products sourced from Chinese manufacturers and suppliers.”^[8]

From there it quotes posts describing emergency room visits, one with a heart rate as low as 43 beats per minute, elevated fasting glucose, severe skin sensations the poster compared to “tiny mites or something crawling and biting,” brain fog, one reported hospitalization, and a second-hand account of someone hospitalized “because of the bacteria” in products that “aren't made in regulated or sterile labs.”^[8]

Now the part that matters most, and the part the coverage skipped: these are self-reported posts that Lilly collected and characterized. The complaint does not claim to have verified any of them. Nobody examined a patient, tested a vial, or confirmed that any of it happened. They are anecdotes selected by a plaintiff to support its own case — which is a perfectly normal thing for a complaint to contain, and a very long way from established fact. Treat them as what they are: a reason to take sterility seriously, not a documented injury count.

Why an exhibit is not evidence

That distinction is also the answer to the question the forums were actually asking. The word doing the damage in those threads is “hearsay.” Hearsay rules govern what a judge or jury may consider at trial. They do not govern what a company may attach to a complaint it files. A complaint is an allegation document. Its job is to state a claim, not to prove one. Whether any of this material ever reaches a judge or jury is a fight that happens much later, if the case gets that far.

The second mix-up is criminal versus civil. Nobody is being charged with anything. These are private lawsuits between companies, and a person who wrote a post is not a party to them. Being quoted in an exhibit is not being accused of anything.

One small detail from reading the filing closely, offered as a measure of how carefully this was assembled: one footnote labels a cited post with the wrong subreddit — the link resolves to a different community than the one named.^[8] A trivial error, and it does not undermine the case. But it is a reminder that a complaint is a first draft of an argument, not a verified record.

The plain fact underneath all of it: a public post is public. Anyone can read it, screenshot it, and cite it, and that has always been true of an open forum. Worth knowing before you post about a product and a dose under a handle you also use elsewhere. It is not a reason to delete anything, and we are not suggesting you do — the community's willingness to report side effects openly is genuinely valuable, and it is one of the very few safety signals this market generates at all. The irony is hard to miss: those reports exist because people were being honest in public, and they are now being used as evidence of the market's danger.

What Actually Changes for Buyers?

Most of what people fear about this story was already true and did not change on August 12. What changes is commercial — payment, shipping, site availability, price. What does not change is product quality, the legality of selling it, or the approval timeline. The table below splits it.

The five “yes” rows all describe commercial pressure, not court orders. That is the whole point of the next section.

Why Your Vendor May Vanish Before a Court Rules

Federal civil litigation is slow. Answers, motions, discovery and trial run in years, and most cases settle quietly somewhere in the middle. Platforms, payment processors and shipping companies are not slow. They act on a compliance email in days, because their downside is regulatory and reputational and the cheapest response is to stop doing business with you. That gap is the whole story of how this reaches you.

What Lilly is actually asking for

Read Lilly's announcement again with that in mind and it stops looking like a lawsuit story. The company said it has referred more than 200 individuals and entities to regulators, reported over 14,000 websites, advertisements, social posts and listings, and identified activity across more than 100 countries — and it explicitly called on platforms to stop enabling the market and on payment companies to cut off the infrastructure behind it.^[1] The six lawsuits are the visible, quotable part of a much larger pressure campaign aimed at the plumbing.

The remedies point the same way. Lilly wants permanent injunctions that would bind not just the defendants but anyone acting in concert with them, compliance reports within 30 days, and the profits handed over.^[8] An order like that is designed to reach suppliers and affiliates who were never named.

The sellers clearly understand the game. The Striker complaint uses archived snapshots of the pharmacy's own website — from November 2025 and March 2026 — to show it listed retatrutide, then removed the listings while, Lilly alleges, continuing to solicit business privately.^[8] That is an allegation, not a finding. But the behavior is visible in the wild right now: CBS reported that two of the sued peptide sellers took down their retatrutide pages on the morning the suits were filed, while retatrutide was still being sold openly over the counter in Brooklyn bodegas days earlier.^[3] A page coming down is not a supply chain shutting down. It is a page coming down.

The sequence buyers actually experience

Here is how this tends to arrive, in order:

1. Checkout starts failing. A card that worked last month is declined. The site posts a note about a “temporary payment issue.”
2. Payment options narrow. Cards disappear, replaced by bank transfer, an app, gift cards or cryptocurrency — all of which move the risk onto you and remove your ability to dispute a charge.
3. Shipping gets slower and vaguer. Tracking numbers arrive late or not at all. “Customs delay” becomes a standing explanation.
4. Orders are taken and not filled. The most common way people lose money here is not a seizure. It is a charge for a package that never existed.
5. The site goes dark, often with inventory paid for and unshipped, and reappears elsewhere under a new name.

That last step deserves precision, because a version of it gets sold to buyers as savvy insider knowledge. When a product shows up under a code name, an internal SKU, or a number instead of the molecule it contains, that is a red flag, not a workaround. A renamed product has no chain of identity: you cannot match it to a certificate of analysis, you cannot verify what batch it came from, and you have no way to tell whether the contents changed along with the label. The name is the only thread connecting a vial to any evidence about what is in it. Cutting that thread is a cost the buyer absorbs, and it is being marketed as a feature.

The practical read: the risk of your vendor becoming unreachable is materially higher than it was, and it is highest for anyone paying in a way that cannot be reversed. If you take one operational lesson from this whole story, that is it.

Why People Buy Gray-Market Anyway

It is worth being honest about why this market exists, because “people are reckless” is not the answer and pretending otherwise makes the rest of the advice useless. Approved GLP-1 medicines are expensive, insurance coverage for obesity is inconsistent, and retatrutide's Phase 3 results were strong enough to generate demand years ahead of any approval. That combination is what a gray market is made of.

An important constraint on this comparison: retatrutide has no price. It is not approved, so no list price, no insurance rate and no cash price exists. Any figure attached to future retatrutide is somebody's guess, including the guesses circulating about what it will cost at launch. We are not going to invent one.

What can be priced is the nearest approved comparable. Lilly's own tirzepatide product Zepbound is offered through its direct pharmacy channel at self-pay prices of $299 a month for the 2.5 mg starting dose, $399 for 5 mg, and $449 for 7.5 mg through 15 mg, where a month means 28 days and refills are made within 45 days of the previous delivery.^[7] That is the real number a US self-payer faces for an approved, tested product today. Gray-market vials are reported to cost a small fraction of it — specific figures circulate constantly in community discussions, but we have not been able to verify any of them, so we are not publishing a number we cannot stand behind.

Here is the counterweight, and it is not a moral argument, it is an accounting one. An unverified vial is cheap because nothing in it has been paid for. The price of an approved medicine includes an inspected manufacturing facility, identity and potency testing on every batch, sterility assurance, endotoxin testing — endotoxins are bacterial fragments that survive sterilization and cause fever and worse when injected — a stability program, and a company that can be sued if it gets any of it wrong. A research vial's price includes none of that. The gap between the two numbers is not margin. It is the cost of the verification you are not getting.

That is a trade some people will make with their eyes open, and treating readers as capable adults means saying so rather than moralizing. It also means being exact about what is being traded away, which is the quality question below.

Does This Change When Retatrutide Gets Approved?

No. Approval depends on trial data and an FDA review clock, and neither is affected by civil litigation against sellers. But this is where the coverage has gone genuinely wrong, and the error is worth correcting carefully, because people are about to plan around a date that does not exist.

Here is Lilly's own sentence, from its July 23, 2026 results announcement: the company “is completing the comprehensive Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls (CMC) data package required for a Biologics License Application (BLA) and plans to subsequently submit retatrutide in Q1 2027 for U.S. approval.”^[4] Submitting is filing. It is the moment the paperwork arrives, not the moment anything is approved.

Watch how that single fact fractured across one news cycle. Lilly's own words say a submission, in Q1 2027. CBS reported that Lilly “plans to seek regulatory approval for the drug in early 2027” — defensible, but easily read as approval arriving in early 2027.^[3] And at least one outlet, working from a separate report, wrote that the submission was expected by the end of this year. One filing date, three different renderings in one week — and only the last is flatly incompatible with what Lilly actually said. When you see “retatrutide, early 2027,” check which verb is attached to it.

Now the arithmetic, which is public and not complicated. The FDA first decides whether the application is complete enough to review, then has roughly six to ten months to reach a decision for a new drug or biologic application^[10] — six under a priority review, ten under a standard one.^[6] Start from a Q1 2027 submission and the earliest realistic FDA decision lands in late 2027 under a priority review, and 2028 under a standard one. Then a decision still has to become a product on a shelf, at a price, with supply. 2028 is the honest planning assumption, and even that is not a promise — approval is never guaranteed.

The data underneath is genuinely strong, and it is worth stating precisely rather than loosely. In TRIUMPH-3, participants “lost up to an average of 55.8 lbs (22.6%) at 80 weeks.”^[4] Hold onto the phrase “up to” — that is the 12 mg arm; the 9 mg arm in the same trial averaged 52.7 lbs (21.6%).^[4] A headline number is almost always a ceiling. Our retatrutide Phase 3 results page covers the earlier dose-response data behind the demand.

These lawsuits do not move any of that by a day. If anything the pressure runs the other way: Lilly is fighting for this market now precisely because it will not have a product in it for years.

Why “BLA” Is the Word to Watch

Almost every report on the lawsuits mentioned the Q1 2027 filing. None noticed which kind of filing it is. Lilly is not planning a New Drug Application, the route small-molecule medicines take. It is planning a Biologics License Application — the route for biologics, the larger and more complex products made in living systems.^[4] That one word carries the rest of the strategy.

Biologics cannot be compounded. Compounding pharmacies work under two sections of federal law, known as 503A and 503B, that let them prepare medicines to order — and that is how compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide reached so many people during the shortage years. Biologics sit outside those pathways entirely. If retatrutide is a biologic, there is no future in which a pharmacy legally makes a cheaper copy of it. Not during a shortage, not ever.

Retatrutide is already barred from compounding today, for a different and simpler reason: the FDA has stated that it “cannot be used in compounding under federal law” because it is not a component of any approved drug and has not been found safe and effective for any condition.^[5] Worth being precise here, because this gets over-generalized constantly: that is a statement about retatrutide, not about compounded GLP-1 medicines generally. Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide have had lawful pathways under specific conditions. Retatrutide never has.

So read the two stories as one. Lilly is suing to clear the unapproved market that exists today, and pursuing a classification that would foreclose the legal, licensed alternative market of tomorrow. Not two unrelated news items — the front and back half of a single approach to owning this molecule. The classification is still genuinely unsettled, and the full argument, including why a couple of amino acids decide it, is in why Lilly is filing retatrutide as a biologic — and what that does to compounding.

Is Gray-Market Retatrutide Actually Dangerous?

The honest answer is that it is unverified, which is not the same as shown to be harmful, and the difference matters in both directions. There is a real, specific safety concern that does not depend on trusting Lilly. There is also a lot of claimed harm that is inference rather than evidence. Here is which is which.

What the evidence actually supports

What is documented. No medicine containing retatrutide has been approved for human use by any regulatory agency in the world, so no gray-market vial has been through the process that would confirm what is in it.^[1] The FDA has said these products “are of unknown quality and may be harmful” and urged consumers not to buy them.^[5] Nothing about a research-chemical supply chain requires batch release testing, endotoxin testing or sterility assurance, and no independent party is accountable if a batch is wrong.

What is not documented, and this is important. Lilly did not test anything. We read the Striker complaint looking specifically for laboratory results, test purchases, or analysis of vials bought from the defendants, and there are none.^[8] The contamination case rests on three things: the FDA's general warnings, those quoted forum posts, and a set of reviews of the pharmacy's compounded products posted on a third-party pharmacy-review site, alleging shorted medication and questionable “purity and concentrations.”^[8] All three are reports. None is a measurement. There is not a single measurement of a single vial, in either complaint we read — and for a case built around product danger, that is a conspicuous gap you should know is there.

So: “unverified” means nobody checked, and nobody checking is not the same as somebody finding something wrong. There is no published body count from gray-market retatrutide, and no systematic surveillance that would produce one if there were. Lilly's characterization is made by a plaintiff with a commercial stake. Anyone telling you gray-market retatrutide is proven dangerous is going past the evidence, in exactly the way that anyone telling you it is fine is.

The science on the molecule itself is a separate matter, and it is genuinely encouraging — the Phase 3 program has reported strong results.^[4] But those results describe a pharmaceutical-grade product, made under inspection, given at a measured dose, in a monitored trial. They do not transfer to an unlabeled vial from an unknown facility. The molecule having good data and your specific vial having good contents are two different claims, and the second one is the one that can hurt you. See what the clinical safety evidence actually shows.

If you are going to buy anyway

Many readers will, and the harm-reduction version is short and worth doing. Insist on a batch-specific certificate of analysis, meaning a lab report tied to the exact lot number on your vial, not a generic PDF for the product line. Look for endotoxin and sterility testing, not just a purity percentage. Treat a missing lot number, a renamed product, a refusal to name the testing lab, or a certificate that predates your batch as disqualifying. Our guide to how to judge a peptide source has the full checklist, and our full retatrutide reference — mechanism, dosing, sourcing and safety keeps the compound-specific picture current.

What to Do If You Have Product or an Order in Transit

Nothing here requires panic, and binning a vial because of a headline is not a considered response. What this week does warrant is about twenty minutes of housekeeping, because the realistic risks — a lost payment, an order that never lands, a product you cannot trace — are all things you can act on today.

1. Check the table above against your vendor. If the name is not among the six, it was not named in this round. If it is, expect disruption regardless of how the case turns out, and do not assume open orders will be filled.
2. Check the status of anything you have already paid for. An order placed and not shipped is the single most likely way to lose money in the next few months.
3. Find out how long you have to dispute a charge. Card networks and banks impose deadlines measured from the transaction or the expected delivery date, and they are shorter than most people assume. If a shipment is overdue, start that clock now rather than waiting politely. It is also why a seller moving you to a payment method with no dispute mechanism should give you pause.
4. Save your paperwork now, while the site is still up. Order confirmations, lot numbers, and the certificate of analysis for your batch. If a vendor disappears, that certificate goes with it, and you are left holding a vial you can no longer connect to any evidence.
5. Know which side effects mean stop and get help. Signs of a serious allergic reaction, severe or persistent abdominal pain, uncontrolled vomiting, or signs of infection at an injection site such as spreading redness, swelling or fever — these are reasons to stop and seek care, not to wait it out. What side effects warrant stopping goes through this properly.
6. Talk to a clinician, even about something unapproved. This is the step people skip out of embarrassment, and it is the one that matters most. A clinician who knows what you are taking can interpret a symptom correctly and check it against your other medications. One who does not know is working blind. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and it is not a substitute for that conversation.

Enforcement here is moving week to week, and the parts that will affect you — payment processors, platforms, shippers — move faster than anything a court will publish. We keep our retatrutide reference current, we will update this post as the cases move, and our newsletter is the fastest way to hear when they do.

One closing thought, because it is the thing most worth carrying out of this week. Three claims are being run together in almost every version of this story: that a lawsuit establishes wrongdoing, that a Phase 3 drug is nearly an approved one, and that a filing date is an approval date. All three are false, and all three are being repeated by people who are not lying — they are compressing. A reader who can pull those apart will not be surprised by anything that happens in this market over the next two years. That is worth more than any prediction we could make about it.