$200m in GAVI funding for rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccines

Our hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, reports today on the $200 million pledge made late last week by GAVI to support vaccination against rotavirus and pneumococcus in the developing world. Here's the GAVI press release about the announcement.

The Inquirer story quotes GAVI's estimates of the potential worldwide benefit of each vaccine in the coming years: 370,000 deaths and 14 million hospitalizations due to rotavirus could be prevented by 2015, as could 447,000 deaths attributable to pneumococcus.

The Inquirer story explains:

"GAVI said it would coordinate with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to acquire and distribute vaccines first in 'countries where the vaccines have shown efficacy. As new and more effective vaccines come on the market, and as political support grows for introducing them in other GAVI countries, we will scale up to meet demand.'"

On the road with Bill and Melinda Gates

Today's Financial Times has a lengthy profile of Bill and Melinda Gates and their well-known philanthropic work. As it does at their foundation, vaccines are featured prominently in the story...

"Gates’s money also helped to develop a special ink for the labels of vaccine vials that changes colour at higher temperatures to show health workers when the vaccine has been spoilt and should not be used.

Both these simple but important technological developments have been supported by the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisations (GAVI), a group set up with strong pressure from Gates, comprising representatives from governments, drugs companies and charities, that picked up the baton on immunisation in 2000 at a time when the large-scale campaigns of Unicef and the World Health Organisation were running out of steam.

GAVI is Gates’s response to criticism that he is obsessed with “blue sky” scientific research: supporting academics and pharmaceutical groups to develop vaccines and drugs for diseases such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis which face such funding and scientific obstacles that they will take years to come to fruition, and may never prove successful."

As the story later explains, this approach too has been criticized by those believing funds could be better spent making proven therapies more widely available. Either way, it's hard to argue that any group has more influence than the Gates Foundation in shaping the future of global health.