As a teen, Lecritia Roberts injected herself with insulin using a glass vial and a syringe to manage her type 1 diabetes, and not without struggle. The 31-year-old South African woman tells the Guardian the glass vials the insulin came in had some downsides, among them less precision and the potential for breakage. The insulin pen was a gamechanger: discreet and easy to transport. Which is why she's so "angry" at "how much harder" Novo Nordisk has made her life with its decision to stop producing human insulin in pens.
The company chose not to renew its contract with South Africa in May, and the country's public health care system ran out of insulin pens by June. The New York Times noted at the time that the vial system had been largely done away with in South Africa in 2014. The company will keep making pens containing analogue insulin, a synthetic substance that costs more, putting them out of reach for many in developing countries. Indeed, Médecins Sans Frontières called the decision "a significant setback for people with diabetes in humanitarian and resource-poor settings" in a September press release.
Critics fault what they see as the motivation behind the move: a desire on Novo Nordisk's part to ramp up the production of—and profit from—injectable weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Critics also flag the fact that syringes and vials are rarely used in wealthy countries. In disputing the claims, Novo Nordisk pointed out that a different type of pen is used with weight-loss drugs, and that "capacity constraints" were driving the insulin change. The Guardian notes that 90% of all insulin production is controlled by Novo Nordisk and two other companies. (More Novo Nordisk stories.)
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