GAVI Update

In light of the third GAVI Partners' Meeting in Delhi (opened by the Indian Prime Minister and attended by Bill Gates), the FT ran a brief article on the global immunization architecture yesterday that touches upon many of the current issues in the vaccine world in general and GAVI in particular. Innovative financing remains at the top of the Alliance's agenda, according to FT:

Gavi is discussing ways to buy out loans to countries made by the World Bank to fund national vaccination programmes, and to finance and organise "advance market commitments", which enable donors to guarantee purchases of future vaccines to stimulate research and development by companies.

However, these new mechanisms also have serious implications for the Alliance's institutional arrangements:

Fresh funds have also sparked a debate about scope for greater independence for Gavi from Unicef, which carries out all the alliance's procurement.

This is especially relevant within the context of the $4 billion International Finance Facility for Immunization, which apparently is growing in size since Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, a former Vaccine Fund board member, announced that Norway will join IFFIm and contribute approximately $1 billion to GAVI through 2015.
But to put these seemingly massive funds in context: WHO projects a total cost of $35 billion over the next decade to implement the Global Immunization Vision and Strategy. The FT article only touches upon these numbers, but a recent presentation at the World Bank disaggregated this projection into its cost components. 33% of the total cost is for traditional (DTP, OPV, measles, BCG, TT), underused (HepB, Hib, YF, rubella) and new (rota, pneumo, JE, mening A) vaccines, 60% for both maintaining and scaling up systems, and 6% for campaign costs (including polio). Taken together, the non-discounted cost per life saved is estimated at $834 for these programs.