HIMS Adds 6.74% as RFK Jr. Pushes FDA to Unwind 12 Restricted Peptides

The Catalyst

On April 16, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the FDA will remove 12 wellness peptides from Category 2 and refer them to the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee. The PCAC meetings are scheduled for July 23 and 24, with independent experts evaluating whether substances including BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTs-C, emideltide, semax, and epitalon belong on the 503A bulks list.

Kennedy framed the move as an effort to shift demand away from the black market. For Hims, it does something more specific: it creates a plausible legal pathway to sell compounded peptides at scale through the same telehealth funnel that built the compounded semaglutide business before the Novo Nordisk settlement shut it down. Hims already acquired a US peptide manufacturing facility in February 2025 — the infrastructure for this outcome has been sitting on the balance sheet for 14 months.

Why the Timing Hurts Bears

HIMS came into Thursday already 14% higher on Wednesday's session, driven purely by positioning — 46% of float short, S3 squeeze score at 100, a break above the 200-week moving average. There was no headline. That made the bear response manageable: hold the short, wait for momentum to fade, reload on the next ramp.

The RFK Jr. peptide announcement erases that playbook. Now bears are not just fighting technicals, they are fighting a regulatory catalyst that opens a new revenue line into exactly the manufacturing capacity Hims pre-positioned. Premarket saw another 6-10% bid on top of Wednesday's close. With 85 million shares still short going into this news, the forced-covering pressure from yesterday just got extended by a fundamental story — and the next binary event is May 11 earnings.

What It's Actually Worth

Sell-side reaction is constructive but careful. Bank of America raised its target to $25 from $21 and lifted its multiple from ~21.5x to ~25.5x, but kept the Neutral rating — BofA is explicit that the peptide path is long-term optionality, not a near-term earnings driver. Leerink held its stance with similar reasoning: PCAC has to actually recommend inclusion, FDA has to actually add the substances to 503A, and Hims has to actually convert capacity into prescribed revenue.

The honest read: this is a positioning move layered on a real but slow catalyst. July is 3+ months out, any approved peptides would take quarters to ramp, and Hims is still a distributor-margin business in the meantime per its low-70% FY2026 margin guide. What changed today is that the bear thesis — Hims is a post-GLP-1 company with no replacement product — has a visible counter. That is enough to keep the squeeze going, and enough to make sizing into earnings a different conversation than it was on Monday.

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