Hims & Hers Health Inc. won’t back down from selling cheap weight-loss shots, its chief executive officer said one day after Novo Nordisk A/S abruptly ended its distribution partnership.

“We’re upset that Novo is feeling the pressure and not comfortable, but ultimately, I think us holding strong to fighting on behalf of customers is just who we are,” Hims CEO Andrew Dudum said Tuesday in his first interview since the news broke. “There’s just no way in hell we’re going to cave on that, no matter who the pharma company is or what the partnership looks like.”

Novo terminated its partnership with Hims Monday over so-called “deceptive marketing” practices related to copycat versions of its hit weight-loss drug Wegovy. The announcement sent Hims’ shares tumbling 35% in New York — the most ever in a single day — as analysts said it left the telehealth company without an attractive obesity profit stream and exposes them to legal risk.

“The big issue with Hims is that we had an agreement that the mass compounding would stop and unfortunately it didn’t stop,” Ludovic Helfgott, executive vice president of product and portfolio strategy at Novo, said in an interview on Monday. “That’s why we ended the partnership.”

Hims refutes that characterization. Dudum called Novo’s comments “misleading” in a post on the social media platform X. He also said that the drugmaker had been pressuring them to steer patients to Wegovy over its compounded medications.

“They were pushing us to a degree that was uncomfortable,” Dudum said in the interview. “They’ve been losing a tremendous amount of market share, there’s been a huge amount of turmoil with management, and I think they’re just under real financial strain to try to drive sales.”

Novo has faced a series of setbacks in recent months. Its weight-loss drug Wegovy has fallen behind Eli Lilly & Co.’s rival drug Zepbound, and its next-generation products have failed to impress investors. Last month, the company said it would replace CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen. The deal with Hims was intended to help broaden access to Wegovy and claw back market share.

Millions of patients had flocked to Hims and other telehealth companies for compounded weight-loss drugs last year when the brand-name versions from Novo and Lilly were in short supply. After those shortages ended, the US Food and Drug Administration no longer allowed pharmacies to make exact copies of the drugs. Telehealth patients who had come to rely on the often cheaper copycat drugs were left to find alternatives.

In April, Hims and Novo teamed up to offer Wegovy at a discounted price through Hims’ platform. At the time, Dudum said the deal was the beginning of the two companies “working together to collaborate on what could be a very broad road map” of different types of drugs.

Hims also said at the time that it still planned to offer compounded shots to a limited group of patients who required so-called personalized dosages of the medication, which is technically allowed under FDA rules. Dudum said in an interview Tuesday that they made clear to Novo there was zero intent to stop allowing access to these personalized medicines.

Novo, however, had expected Hims to pull back on marketing the compounded versions, executives said. Hims didn’t adhere to the law prohibiting “mass sales” of compounded medicines that have been tweaked to be considered personalized, according to Novo, and was “disseminating deceptive marketing that put patient safety at risk.”

Dudum maintains that Hims’ actions are “completely compliant and legal.”

“We’ve aimed I think in all aspects to be extremely blue chip in the way we approach clinical safety and the regulatory approach,” he said, pointing to board member Deb Autor, a former deputy commissioner at the FDA with extensive experience in compounding regulations.

“There’s a lot of commercial pressure that’s continuing to occur” at Novo, Dudum said. “I think the business tension that they felt got to a point where they were just asking us to do things that were, from our perspective, really inappropriate and we weren’t comfortable with it. That’s probably all I can say on that.”