As we’ve seen, bedaquiline is a powerful medicine in the fight against MDR-TB, but since its first release in 2013, it was far out of reach for most people living with the disease, because J&J charged $900 for a single course of treatment in poor countries and $3,000 in middle-income countries like South Africa. And so most kids like Phumeza with drug-resistant tuberculosis could never receive appropriate treatment—not because it was unavailable, but because it wasn’t “cost-effective.”
