MSF wants to buy groundbreaking HIV prevention drug. Why won’t Gilead sell?
Today, 30 March, Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) sent an open letter to the US pharmaceutical corporation Gilead Sciences, calling on the company to immediately sell to MSF, lenacapavir, an HIV medicine that is one of the most important advances in HIV prevention in decades.
About 1.3 million people worldwide acquire HIV every year, underscoring the urgent need to scale up access to highly effective prevention tools such as long-action pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications.
MSF, an international medical humanitarian organisation, focuses HIV prevention activities on key vulnerable populations like men who have sex with men, transgender individuals, and sex workers, and works in conflict and other fragile settings.
Access to HIV prevention medicines, and maintaining adherence to taking daily doses, can be extremely difficult. Long-acting HIV prevention tools like lenacapavir, which only needs to be given twice a year by injection, can thus be life-saving for people at high HIV risk.
Despite Gilead’s public claims that it can expand production of lenacapavir to meet needs, the company has refused requests from MSF to purchase a limited supply for use in our programmes.
So far, only a handful of countries of the 18 eligible under the Gilead and Global Fund agreement, have received doses of lenacapavir, while millions of people remain at high risk of HIV acquisition worldwide.
Gilead has directed MSF to source doses through the Global Fund, even though their supply is fixed and insufficient – enough for up to 2 million people over 3 years, which is well below the global need. Furthermore, some countries where MSF works are not eligible to receive doses through the Global Fund due to restrictions put in place by Gilead.
“Blocking humanitarian organisations from accessing a medical breakthrough puts vulnerable people in danger,” Dr Tom Ellman, Director of the Southern Africa Medical Unit (SAMU), MSF, said.
“Gilead must decide whether it prioritises protecting people or protecting control and profit. This is a chilling echo of the policies we saw in the 1990s when antiretrovirals were provided to those in the global North, while the rest of the world was denied access and many lives were lost to HIV/AIDS.”
MSF has requested an urgent follow-up meeting with Gilead by 13 April to clarify if they will sell lenacapavir directly, at what price it will be sold, and when supply can begin.
MSF and access to medicines
One third of the world does not have access to essential medicines.
In the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, this figure rises to half the population. We challenge the high cost of medicines and the absence of treatment for many of the diseases affecting our patients.
Too often we cannot treat patients because the medicines are too expensive, or they are no longer produced.
Sometimes, the only drugs we have are highly toxic or ineffective and nobody is looking for a better cure.
As a medical humanitarian organisation, it is fundamentally unacceptable that access to essential medicines is increasingly difficult, particularly for the most common global infectious diseases.