The Lancet quotes CGD vice-president and senior fellow Ruth Levine on advance market commitments for vaccines.
From the article:
"An expert group headed by Ruth Levine, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development—a think-tank based in Washington, DC, USA—had studied the options, and held consultations with vaccine producers to get a sense of their pain threshold. Days prior to what was meant to be the last meeting of the AMC donors (May, 2008) to hammer out the final details of the scheme, Levine's group presented a report to the donors in which they recommended a price of $10 per dose.
Norway, alone among the donors, argued that this was too high and feared that the terms were being set “on industry's premises”. Internal documents show that Norway insisted that the price should not be higher than $7, and managed to convince the other donors to agree.
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) says that the initiative will save 7 million lives by 2030. A logical question is what was gained by pushing the price down by 30%? How many more lives are expected to be saved with this AMC compared with the higher price of $10? The difficulty of finding clear answers to these questions indicates one of the fundamental problems of the years-long AMC process: the lack of transparency in the deliberations, which has hampered informed public debate about this huge aid-financed project."
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