GAVI announces $700 million bond issue to fund child immunization
GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the umbrella public-private partnership group set up to increase access to vaccines for children in the world’s poorest countries, announced a long term bond financing scheme to assure long term procurement of vaccines. Targeted at pneumonia and diarrheal disease vaccines, as well as more basic vaccines, the hope is that use of this platform will encourage both continued R&D as well as high volume (lower cost) manufacturing from selected vaccine producers. The use of bonds represents using a novel financing mechanisms to achieve large, global social impact.
Several points to note from my perspective on this huge development which will protect millions of lives.
1. This initiative took perhaps 15 years to get off the ground from when first proposed by PATH vaccine experts. I heard of it first from Dr Jim Maynard in the 1990s, head of vaccines at PATH at the time, at a small UN conference of vaccine experts from the NGO, multilateral agency and pharmaceutical industry.
2. There is a risk that with such large and long term outlays designed to provide incentives to manufacture the selected vaccines, success itself may inhibit new and lower costs vaccines from arising. Thus vigilance will be needed (and no doubt is planned) in order to not distort the vaccine industry. The emergence of a vibrant developing country set of vaccine manufacturers, supported over many years by WHO and others, is a testament to industry growth potential.
3. This is a major early win for the new President of the World Bank , Dr Jim Yong Kim, himself an MD with significant public global health experience. The Bank will play a major role in managing this new International Finance Facility. As head of the Bank he is positioned to make a major mark in global health, maybe even larger than Bill Gates himself, overseeing what perhaps may become a driving forces for current and new nvaccines.
Zeil Rosenberg 7/7/2013