No­var­tis' com­pas­sion­ate use re­quests world­wide: Just 0.5% came from low­er-mid­dle- and low-in­come coun­tries

From 2018 through 2020, No­var­tis re­ceived al­most 32,000 re­quests from 110 coun­tries to use one of the com­pa­ny’s ex­per­i­men­tal drugs (known as “com­pas­sion­ate use” re­quests, or in the US, “ex­pand­ed ac­cess“) for pa­tients with se­ri­ous or life-threat­en­ing med­ical con­di­tions.

But when the re­quests were di­vid­ed by each par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­try’s GDP, the No­var­tis re­searchers found that just 0.5% of the re­quests came from low­er-mid­dle- and low­er-in­come coun­tries. When strat­i­fied by gross na­tion­al in­come, on­ly 3% of the re­quests came from low­er-mid­dle- and low­er-in­come coun­tries.

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