Billions committed for children’s vaccines

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJun 13 2011

British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged £814m to help vaccinate children around the world against preventable diseases like pneumonia. He made the announcement at a summit in London where countries are being asked to give an extra £2.3bn ($3.7bn) by 2015 for child vaccines. He said, “Three children die every minute from pneumonia alone. Waiting is not the right thing to do and I don't think that 0.7 per cent of our gross national income is too high a price to pay for saving lives.”

The Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization - GAVI says this could help save four million lives in four years. Australia has committed $200 million to the vaccine program. Three times as many children aged under five die from pneumonia and diarrhea than from malaria and HIV/AIDS combined because developing countries can't afford new vaccines on offer. GAVI already provides vaccines for children in 19 countries and it wants to extend its reach to 26 countries.

The UK has pledged $1.3 billion which will be matched by the Microsoft tycoon, Bill Gates. Gates said, “This is a magic day. It's the first day that the poor kids of the world are going to get the same vaccines that the rich kids take for granted.”

Justin Forsyth is the CEO of Save the Children, UK, said, “Well the UK, the Gates Foundation themselves, also Norway, Australia, the US have all stepped up to the mark. Other governments haven't quite. I mean we need a little bit more from Germany, Austria, some other European countries - Italy haven't gone as far as we wanted - and we need to keep the pressure up on them.”

The pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to sell a diarrhoeal vaccine at cost price, $2.50 per dose, to poorer nations. CEO Andrew Witty said, “In somewhere like the United States you might pay about $50 a dose. In Uganda, today you might pay $8 or $9 and then with this offer we're providing the vaccine at the very lowest price - essentially our cost of production, so we make no profit on this - via GAVI to the poorest countries in the world. So we have a very clear tiered pricing approach.”