Episode Details

A drug called lenacapavir could end AIDS. Two injections a year. Costs twenty-five dollars to manufacture, less than a Netflix subscription. Gilead Sciences charges twenty-eight thousand dollars per person per year in the US. Doctors Without Borders spent a year trying to buy it directly from Gilead, not asking for a discount, just trying to purchase medicine. According to MSF, Gilead’s final answer was that negotiating supply contracts is “a lot of work.”

This is the same company that priced a Hepatitis C cure at eighty-four thousand dollars and whose CEO made forty million dollars that year. Meanwhile the Trump administration has gutted PEPFAR, credited with saving twenty-six million lives, and dismantled USAID entirely.

My oldest friend Peter Maybarduk, director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen, told the LA Times: “We have a technology that could end AIDS, and collectively we’re wasting it.”

Gilead’s CEO speaks tomorrow at a webcast with State Department officials. We will be watching, with extremely low expectations. The company is named Gilead, after the biblical region famous for its healing balm. Apparently the irony was not a dealbreaker.

Read the full article here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-09/this-rich-pharma-company-has-miracle-drug-for-hiv-why-is-it-refusing-to-license-it-worldwide

Peter Maybarduk