“It requires a nice healthy demand to ensure that for each of the generic companies, it’s going to be worth their while,” says Bekker. “We are all hoping that governments [across sub-Saharan Africa] are writing the generic product into their budgets for the future, but the reality is that in the interim, we were relying on donor funding. Even my country, South Africa, which has a good GDP and funds 80 percent of its HIV response, is already purchasing antiretrovirals for 6 million individuals annually. I would imagine it will take them some years to be able to mobilize the money for lenacapavir as well.”
With PEPFAR seemingly now focused primarily on the treatment of existing patients, at the expense of prevention, clinicians like Nomathemba Chandiwana, a physician-scientist at the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation in South Africa, are concerned that the infection rate will…
