'We can end HIV': Groundbreaking preventative drug to be rolled out for $40 a year from 2027
https://www.france24.com/en/health/20250925-groundbreaking-hiv-prevention-injection-to-be-rolled-out-for-40-dollars-a-year-from-2027Open linkView original on lemmy.ca841
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And anti vaxxers will make some bullshit claim, making idiots believe it, and it'll only halfway eliminate HIV.
Not just them, but the religious fuckers who want everyone to suffer "consequences" for the sin of sex. Same ones that freak out about HPV vaccine.
I know there is a lot of overlap. But it isn't total.
At least this way you can save most of the smart ones.
Religious people often have smart kids. They need protection.
You know what, if you have HIV and throw your lot in with them then you've only got yourself to blame. If they had their way they'd throw you down a well for having it.
Problem is "that lot" is running the HHS (including the CDC) so people that want medicine in the US may not have access, even if they can afford it (which is becoming more unlikely than before).
Americans will find some way to blame the democrats for it tho, so the few people that actually vote will just vote in "that lot" again.
40 dollars in low income countries. 28,000 dollars in the united states. The drug is made in the united states.
WTF.
Makes you wonder if Trump has a point.
But thanks to RFK and Trump, there will be no more drugs like this in the future. Gilead did the trials, but 95% of the effort behind this was NIH funded. We can't even guess how many game changing drugs have been cut in 2025.
As always Trump completely misunderstands the situation. Yes there’s a point in how exepnsive drugs are in the us, especially relative to other countries. But whether it’s manufactured in the us has almost nothing to do with it.
The problem is recovering all the development costs from American patients, and more recently just charging what they think the market will bear. We have to fix the complex maze of healthcare and all the levels of profiteering, we have to fix how development costs can be recovered and most of all we need to fix charging what the market will bear. Has everyone already forgotten the outcry over insulin a few years ago. A ceo who should be in jail decided to start charging ten or twenty times the cost, because he could, because us patients are a captive market. Then got away with saying “some of you can use these coupons….”. There’s definitely a point where exploitive business practices have crossed the line and should be considered criminal acts
Yeeeaaahhh, but no.
There is also a huge amount of plain greed in there, drug companies aren't exactly known for being very generous to put it mildly. Cost of healthcare in the US is beyond insanely expensive and that isn't just because Americans are rich, the vast majority aren't and for many, getting sick is not only a death sentence, it's also a death sentence to the family as they'll be stuck with the medical bills that will bankrupt them.
The US healthcare system is beyond fucked up with corruption and just plain extortion. Wanna live? Say, that's a nice first born you have there!
I've encountered this: This treatment is $10,000 if you pay out of pocket, but we'll charge your insurance company $680 for it.
The issue here is that the bigger insurance companies literally set the prices for services and drugs.
You wanna keep doing business with United, you charge them what they're willing to pay, otherwise they'll just reject claims or put you out of network altogether.
It's FUBAR.
Drug development in trials costs $120-200M. Upon approval, Pharma expects $15B +.
They have proven they would rather a drug not save lives than offer lower profits.
if a product can be sold at 10 times the profit to one fifth the people only an idiot would not rase prices ten fold
A hell of a lot of that is funded by tax payers. They don't need to recoup money, they need to give the tax payers what they already paid for.
speaking as a indian - the reason that this is possible because we kinda ignore medical patents and formulations. (using kinda because i do not know the exact wording in law and the cooldown period).
It should also tell you about the cost of ingredients and manufacturing vs the costs you pay for "rnd for big companies" (who often build upon work done by universities which often are run by public fundiing)
Pharmaceutical companies used to do basic research until the 90s. At this point, they are just banks who buy biotechs spun out from NIH research.
Now that NIH is gone, the industry will atrophy within a decade. There will be no new drugs.
Those companies spend more on advertising than RND
15 years on patent drugs.
I figured this would come up but you've gotta remember that drugs are expensive as hell to develop. And it just received US approval in June so it's not like they have been sitting on this making money for years.
The cost of drug development is vastly overstated as an excuse. The reality is $100-200M, but pharma expects $14B++ in returns. Little of that goes back into basic research.
The front end of costs was spent by the NIH, and after that was ended, Pharma is not taking up the slack. It's not sustainable and pharma will die in a decade.
Yeah, a lot of these drug companies have ad budgets larger than the R&D budget, but any overhead is used to jack up the prices. I swear ads are sold at inflated prices for the sake of being able to sell high.
Just because development of a single drug costs not that much does not mean you don't need to pay for failed drugs too. If many drugs die during trials someone gotta pay for that. Profitability is a better indicator for greed.
Gilead’s own words show they aren’t hurting in the least for profits. It’s definitely greed.
You must look at the whole sector as failures sink companies but yes.
I'd like to see some sources on those numbers, I couldn't find any of that when I searched.
ok so US citizens are supposed to subsidize the cost of the drug for the entire planet???
No they arent, it's pretty imbalanced, but effectively that is what's happening.
I believe this would be known as an "understatement"
Fuck...
Why can't we have nice things?
You know why
Capitalism
A.K.A. Billionaire Socialism
socialism has the state make compromises, what the rich has allows them to make their own
in this case: copyright/patents of chemicals
Generic versions of a groundbreaking injectable HIV-prevention drug should be available for $40 a year in more than 100 countries from 2027, Unitaid and the Gates Foundation said Wednesday.
…
Marketed under the brand name Yeztugo by California-based Gilead Sciences, lenacapavir currently costs around $28,000 a year in the United States.
FUCK GILEAD
clearly they should have tried a smaller time frame to get a more reasonable price
Sounds like a good thing therefore the brainworm in charge of health here in the states will surely get it banned. Or at least made to cost several thousand percent more than it costs to make.
Thank goodness the west coast states have created their own health consortium and a bunch of east coast states have followed suit. I live in one of those east coast states, and just got a covid booster no questions asked. It is also covered 100% by my insurance.
So do I and I did the same and it was so easy. I felt hella privileged sitting in that chair this year.
Not quite brainworm's fault we are getting extorted for drugs.
Maybe not, but you can always count on MAGA to exploit a broken policy rather than fix it.
Oh no! Quick! Cut their Funding!
-The USA!
No no, keep their funding but make a Pharmaceutical company around it and only release pills with enough potency to treat instead of cure
"We can end HIV":
...as long as we can convince everyone to take it. So, yeah. Good luck with that.
You can convince people of everything, if it depends on you having more sex or not.
No pills. Have sex. Die. No sex.
Yes pills. Have sex. Live. More sex.
Edit:
Already a thing. Check the syphilis statistics.
Wouldnt I still need to rubber up to avoid genital warts, herpes, Hep, HPV, among others?
Of course, but rubbers can fail and they don't prevent everything. Many STDs like herpes, hpv etc are not stopped by them because they are transferred by skin contact, not necessarily genital contact. So yea they're still a great idea.
I've never had intercourse without one as all my gfs preferred the extra safety. No problem.
Two pills, but also celibacy.
You don't need to convince everyone, just enough people.
Were already seeing really good progress with pills and condoms, so an option which doesn't need to be taken on a strict daily schedule will be a huge boon.
Pastors: NO! How will I condemn the gays now?!
Capitalism: That's great but what's the profit margin?
Fascists: That drug causes autism, use this one instead (that just so happens to also profit us)
$80 in the US. Because our president is a buffoon
Free with many insurances though! It may take a little longer to get a "Prior Authorization," but as long as you say you're in an at-risk group for HIV (Google these) it will eventually get approved.
The rationale is that since treating HIV+/AIDS is so astronomically more expensive than merely paying for this once every 6 months PrEP, that insurance actuaries determine the latter to be way more in the insurance company's interest.
This is good since it doesn't require the insurance companies to be ethical, just cheap. But a win-win is still a win-win, so I say take it where you can get em. {Former pharmacist here, feel free to reach out and ask how to get non-addictive drugs covered} 🪿
Hi Qualia, my brother is medically obese and uninsured. Does he have any chance of getting some sort of weight loss drug for free or low-cost? He has sleep/wake cycle problems too.
slid into yer DMs
I somehow read your post as "Free with insurgencies". Not sure what thats about.
banned in the us. because the president and health secretary is a bag of dicks.
That's for bigots to not being ashamed of taking pills against sexually transmited diseases? See, Hetero is in it's very name, so it's fine!
That’s ok, I’m sure it won’t be allowed to sell in the us. Profits will be intact
Yes, the US won't get the Hetero, they'll only get the sparkly $28000 version, called the Homo.
"Preventative drug"? Is this what we're calling vaccines now?
There are No vaccines for HIV. This is a drug that if taken continually will prevent the virus from taking hold.
It is an interesting what makes the distinction.
The core principle of vaccination is training the immune system with a substance so that a disease can be defeated later on.
Nothing says that a vaccine needs to be an injection. There are injection vaccines that need multiple doses before the immune system reaches a certain level.
So why would a pill that trains your immune system not be a vaccine?
I guess a pill could be a vaccine, but this drug is neither a vaccine nor a pill, so I have no clue why youre bringing this up.
It's not a vaccine. It does not trigger an immune response. Science says vaccines cannot be pills, they either need to be intramuscular or inhaled aerosol. This is because they are proteins, which get digested through the stomach and gut.
Some vaccine are oral based (but as a liquid, not as pill). We don't use them in the West as we have robust viccine that are injection based. But those vaccine requires a way more robust supply chain than many third world countries has, so oral vaccine, while not as effective as injection based vaccine, are used there.
Problem with oral vaccine is that most pathogens are killed by the digestive system so the only one that could be made as a pill would be those who already are acclimated to such a harsh environment (so gut microbiology).
There are very few digestive disease that would allow for such vaccine vector to be developed, the only one that could these last few decade would be Ebola. But for such a deadly disease (90% mortality if I remember well), the medical community would prioritize the most effective way, which would be injection.
There is also an oral polio vaccine that was developed.
Exactly, as the polio virus is resistant to digestive acids, and is transmited oraly, initially developing in the digestive system.
A vaccine is administered to teach the immune system how to beat something. These drugs prevent certain processes in the virus replication cycle and have to be taken continuously for life to be effective.
vaccine is a scientific term, meaning a weaker (or, rather, as weak as scientifically possible) version of the same virus / bacteria, so that immune system could learn to fight it without dying in the process.
This is not a vaccine, as has an active substance, that chemically interacts either with our body, HIV's shell, or both
There are more ways, weak virus, dead virus, modified virus, payload swap virus and an mRNA blast.
Would love to see this HIV vac get more development and become permanent and a part of infant vaccine routine until it just fucking dies.
of course there are. I was axcited to hear about Vectors when they were developed. It's nice to see scientists come up with something new
MRNA vaccine works differently if I remember well. Basically instead of injecting the weaker virus itself, they trick the body to produces non-active parts of that pathogens in order to train the body.
wow, cool, good to know something like that exists. What are we vaccinating against with MRNA?
Covid. Like 80% of the vaccine where mRNA based.
oh, cool
HIV infects the immune cells, which is why attempts at vaccines failed.
Yeah HIV doesn't use traditional warfare: it bombs hospitals. 😔
That's standard warfare to some these days.
We can :) But, we probably won't :(
But what about the Tylenol?
Probably doesn't prevent HIV.
Just to clarify the potentially confusing title. This drug came out three months ago in the US, is a version of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) that only needs to be taken every six months, and is free with most insurances if you're in an at-risk demo.
the article says it costs around $28,000. i don' mean to interrogate bu' d'ya have a source saying taht insurance covers that all
Since the Affordable Care Act it's been a legal mandate for all non-grandfathered-in insurances to cover all A & B recommendations with zero copay, which includes PrEP. Sources: HIV.gov, USPSTF.
Any disease that specializes in inserting itself into the host genome and then eradicating their immune system needs to be wiped out.
It's coming down to $40 in 2027 thanks to a deal between governments and the drug companies
The US (and other high-income countries) are not included in that licensing deal, meaning the non-insured in those countries will hafta wait for the domestic patent protections to expire (2034-2041) or be successfully challenged in the courts.
Ok that's indeed steep then 😢
is it called prep?
Yeah I hate to say it, but I worked in HIV prevention in the late 2000s, and we really thought prep was going to be the end of HIV, along with rigorous testing and linkage to care.
Since then, HIV rates have exploded in many areas, silently, because we've gone fully regressive on sex ed.
I have friends that became HIV positive before they even knew about prep.
WTF happened.
Boomers aged and shifted to the right.
This is actually not true. People are
actually more left thanmostly the same ideologically as when they were younger, even though the right wing takeover of media would have us believe that people have swung right.https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17a56o1/moving_from_left_to_right_wing_as_we_age_true_in/
Let me find a link to a study...[Edited to add link to a Reddit comment which explains this, including links to studies, and updating incorrect assertions by me.]
What, are you crazy?
I don't have that kind of money!
Then you should have sex with as many rich people as possible then die as quickly and quietly as possible, there's a good chap.
Best regards, Your corporate overlords
quickly, sure. quietly, well, when this cannon goes it'll be loaded