Rising Oil Prices Could Raise HIV Drug Manufacturing Costs by 15%

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The war with Iran has driven oil prices up, prompting concern that the supply of some medicines will be disrupted. But there is another consideration. In a new report, Unitaid emphasized that essential medicines are exposed to oil price volatility. Specifically, the global health agency examined the effect rising oil prices could have on one HIV medication and found that manufacturing costs could rise by 15% if oil reaches $120 barrel, and 85% of those higher costs are driven by petrochemical ingredients. To push back, Julien Pouille, who leads the climate and health strategic team and is lead author of the report, argues that lessening reliance on petrochemical products would help mitigate rising medicine costs and improve the climate. This is an edited version of our conversation.

So what prompted this exploration?

As part of our access strategy, we have a climate and health strategy that looks into ways in which basically we can just advance product knowledge that’s good for health, but also good for climate.… And of course, in the context of the Middle East crisis… we thought it was very timely to look into, specifically, the relationship between medicine prices and oil prices, because we were anticipating that that could potentially lead to some risks in terms of access for people and the population we work for.

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