“More children than ever before are being immunized against infectious diseases”

Jan 12th, 2010 11:57 AM UTC
By Chris Scott

The World Bank has a piece looking at the World Health Organization’s “State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunizations” and notes the great progress being made on this front. Our friends at GAVI are singled out as instrumental in delivering needed vaccines and immunizations to developing countries. You can read the full analysis here.

“It’s an amazing success story for public health,” says Amie Batson, assistant to World Bank Managing Director Graeme Wheeler and the World Bank’s original representative in the GAVI Alliance.

And one that wasn’t assured when GAVI was formed in 2000 to reinvigorate immunization as a key weapon against childhood illness and mortality.

In the late 1990s, immunization programs in low-income countries faced an uncertain future. The supply of cheap vaccines for such diseases as diphtheria, measles and polio was drying up as producers shifted to more expensive combination vaccines targeted at industrialized countries, according to the vaccine report. New vaccines available in rich countries weren’t being introduced to poorer ones. Vaccine research and development had fallen to low levels.

“At the time, there was great concern that immunization was one of the most important tools in the public health arsenal, and yet it seemed to have stalled,” says Batson.

In response, the partners created GAVI to help correct the inequities through funding introduction of new and underused vaccines in developing countries.

Lacking the capacity to monitor inputs into the immunization process itself, GAVI instead focused on results, reimbursing countries a certain amount for each additional child immunized, with WHO monitoring the outcomes. It was an innovative system that produced results, says Batson.

TAGS: GAVI, World Bank