Geneva/Nairobi, 5 September 2025
Dr Elizabeth Jarman, noncommunicable diseases technical advisor, MSF Access:
Countries must now take this opportunity to spur national action and make these treatments available and affordable to people with diabetes, no matter where in the world they live.
“We welcome the inclusion of rapid-acting insulin analogues and GLP-1 agonists to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Model List of Essential Medicines List (EML) as a critical milestone on the path towards increasing access to diabetes treatment. Countries must now take this opportunity to spur national action and make these treatments available and affordable to people with diabetes, no matter where in the world they live.
In our experience of providing diabetes care in low-resource settings and humanitarian emergencies, rapid-acting insulins and GLP-1s are unaffordable and often unavailable. Current prices are unacceptably high, with rapid-acting insulin analogues priced as much as 84 times and GLP-1 agonists 400 times higher than what they can be profitably produced for, according to a recent MSF study.
We call on countries to take urgent steps to update their national EMLs, begin procurement planning, and – alongside the WHO – demand pharmaceutical corporations make these key diabetes treatments available in-country by immediately registering them and – critically – making them affordable.”
