Saving kids: Who doesn’t want to do that? Though relatively uncontroversial (say, compared to saving drug addicts and sex workers), the agenda for child survival is not new. In fact, it’s a (relatively) old agenda in global health, arguably dating back to the time of UNICEF's third Executive Director James Grant (1980-1995) who pushed to recognize the “global silent emergency” and to reduce preventable child deaths.
This blog was co-authored with Orin Levine, Executive Director, International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and it will be cross-posted on his Huffington Post blog at www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-orin-levine
In low- and middle-income countries, children living in poverty are much less likely to be vaccinated and more likely to die or become ill from a vaccine-preventable disease than better-off children. An example comes from Nigeria, where less than 5% of children in the lowest quintile of the wealth distribution were fully vaccinated in 2003, as opposed to 40% of children in the wealthiest quintile. (For more on inequalities in health, see here)
In announcing a $10 billion, decade-long commitment for vaccine development and immunization in poor countries, Bill Gates made no claims that the vaccine financing challenges are solved. Quite the contrary. He and many others have highlighted the need for other donors, industry and developing country governments to up their own ante to immunization.
Let's think about what decisionmakers in Ministries of Health need to know to make informed choices about what vaccines to introduce into their immunization programs, when and how. The list is long: disease burden, vaccine efficacy, costs and benefits of different introduction strategies (general or high-risk populations? routine or campaign?), financing approaches and more. And the lack of that information, available in a credible and timely way, is one of the barriers to uptake of newer vaccines.
Greetings from Rome, where Italy, Canada, Russia, Norway and the UK, with the World Bank, GAVI and the Gates Foundation, have launched the first Advance Markets Commitment. The first AMC will target pneumococcal disease, costing about $1.5 billion and expected to prevent more than 5 millions deaths by 2030.
Check out the Baltimore Sun op-ed by Orin Levine (Executive Director of PneumoADIP) and Michael Klag (Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) endorsing a pilot advance market commitment for a pneumococcal vaccine. And for more information, see GAVI's new AMC fact sheet (.pdf).
Here are some moments from this morning's launch of Making Markets for Vaccines that touched me personally.
We have decided to launch the report of the Center for Global Development Working Group, "Making Markets for Vaccines", on World Health Day, April 7th 2005.
We've been lucky to get some great speakers for the event. The line-up so far includes:
Today's Washington Post has a very interesting piece on the economics of vaccine development.