HIV prevention drug hailed as breakthrough, but who gets access?

A medicine injected just twice a year could transform the fight against HIV. In a 2024 clinical trial involving more than 2,000 young women in South Africa and Uganda, no participants who received lenacapavir contracted HIV. Developed by United States pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, the injectable drug can be used to prevent HIV. “It’s the most innovative tool that has reached the HIV arena for the last decade, because it’s the closest we have [to] a vaccine,” Carlota Baptista da Silva, global HIV lead at Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials, MSF), told Al Jazeera.