How the HIV-prevention drug could break the NHS

If NHS England ever comes to be dismantled it won’t be because a heartless Tory government has decided that, for reasons of neoliberal ideology, it ought to be replaced by private insurance schemes. It will be because the unreasonable and limitless demands placed on it by those who claim to be its friends have inflated its budget to a level that public funds can simply no longer sustain. That moment was brought a little closer last week by a victory in the High Court for the National Aids Trust (NAT). The trust had argued that the NHS should fund, at £400 per month a time, a group of drugs known as PrEP, or Pre-exposure Prophylaxis. These were developed as pills for treating HIV infection but have more recently been found to lower the incidence of HIV infection when taken on a regular basis by HIV-negative gay men.

Pro-PrEP campaigners like to compare the drug to the contraceptive pill, which is available by NHS prescription.