The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said today (January 29) that they will donate $10 billion over the next 10 years to develop vaccines and deliver them to the world’s poorest countries. The donation, announced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, is the foundation’s largest contribution to vaccine research and distribution, more than doubling the $4.5 billion sum it has given over the last five years.
[Source: The Scientist]
| With the money, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hopes to raise immunization rates for diarrhea and pneumonia to 90%, which could save some 7.6 million children under the age of five by 2019, according to a model developed at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, Nature Newsreported. Furthermore, if the malaria vaccine being developed by GSK –currently in its final testing phase — is introduced by 2014, it could save an additional 1.1 million lives, the Gates Foundation estimates.
“We must make this the decade of vaccines,” Gates said in a statement. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.” (Check out our recent feature on the vaccine development industry, which thanks in part to recent investment in the developing world, is now thriving.) |
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