Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Bill and Melinda Gates said
their foundation will commit $10 billion over the next decade to help
develop vaccines for the world’s poorest countries, a project that may
save the lives of 8.7 million children.
The initiative aims to vaccinate 90 percent of
children in developing nations, including new immunizations for
pneumonia and severe diarrhea, the foundation said in a statement
today. The funding is in addition to $4.5 billion that the charity
already pledged to vaccine research and delivery. Governments and the
private sector need to contribute more money as well, Gates said.
“Here is where you can take a donation and really
map it, see it saving lives,” Bill Gates, the co-founder and former
chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., said at a news conference
in Davos, Switzerland, the site of the World Economic Forum this week.
Gates’s Seattle-based charity, the world’s biggest,
has made health care for the poor the focus of its work in an effort to
tackle infectious diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. The
foundation has helped fund GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s research into a
malaria vaccine and has contributed to Sanofi-Aventis SA’s work on a
shot for dengue fever.
The foundation used a model developed at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to project the impact of
vaccines on childhood deaths over the next decade.
Vaccinations
By vaccinating 90 percent of the population in
developing countries, the deaths of about 7.6 million children under
the age of 5 could be prevented in the next decade, according to the
Gates foundation. An additional 1.1 million lives would be saved by the
introduction of a malaria vaccine beginning in 2014, the foundation
said.
The United Nations will pay an average of about
$2.94 a shot this year for a vaccine against five deadly childhood
diseases, officials said in November. Four companies make the
five-in-one shots -- Crucell NV, Glaxo, Panacea Biotec Ltd and Sanofi’s
Shantha Biotechnics. The shots are given to children in their first
year of life to protect against Haemophilus influenzae type B,
hepatitis B, tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis.
Glaxo wants to file for regulatory approval by early
2012 for its malaria vaccine, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty said
last week. The foundation has spent $200 million developing the shot,
while the company has invested $300 million, Alexandra Harrison, a
Glaxo spokeswoman, said in an interview.
‘Transformative’
The Gates announcement “is transformative for
research into diseases of the developing world,” Jean Stephenne, the
head of Glaxo’s biologicals unit, said in an e-mailed statement today.
“After clean water, vaccines are the most effective public- health
intervention that can be offered in these countries.”
The foundation is part of the GAVI Alliance, a
health partnership from the private and public sectors that was formed
10 years ago at the World Economic Forum to reduce the price of
vaccines for people in poor nations.
“Investments in global immunization have yielded an
extraordinary return,” Julian Lob-Levyt, the alliance’s chief executive
officer, said in the statement. The alliance has saved 5 million lives
by increasing access to vaccines, he said. “The potential to make
bigger strides in the coming decade is even more exciting.”
Other charities have teamed up with vaccine
manufacturers to develop immunizations for diseases that mostly strike
the poor. Merck & Co. and The Wellcome Trust in September formed a
not-for- profit venture in India that aims to create new immunizations
and make existing vaccines more effective in the developing world.
- William Howoong Chun
Source: Business Week
