Bill Gates-Backed Group Commits $390 Million to Ebola Vaccines
Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) — The GAVI Alliance, the biggest provider of money for vaccines sent to developing countries, will commit as much as $390 million to buy Ebola shots and support their use in an effort to stop the deadly outbreak in West Africa.
The Geneva-based organization funded by governments and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will pay as much as $300 million for 12 million courses of Ebola vaccines, it said in a statement today. GAVI will also provide as much as $45 million to roll out vaccines that win endorsement from the World Health Organization and a further $45 million to help Ebola-affected countries rebuild health systems and immunization services.
Drugmakers including GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Merck & Co., NewLink Genetics Corp. and Johnson & Johnson are working with regulators and nonprofit groups to develop a workable vaccine for a disease that has infected almost 18,000 people and killed more than 6,000, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
“We are making determined efforts to ensure that people living in Ebola-affected countries are protected as soon as possible and do not have to face another terrible outbreak in the future,” Dagfinn Hoeybraaten, chairman of GAVI’s board, said in the statement.
Funding from GAVI may also be used to create stockpiles of first- and second-generation Ebola vaccines, which countries can access rapidly in future outbreaks.
Typically, getting a vaccine from the lab bench to clinics where it’s injected into patients’ arms takes as long as a decade. Glaxo and NewLink have started safety trials on humans, and targeted immunization programs could start in the second half of next year — unprecedented speed for such research.
Since 2000, GAVI has contributed to the immunization of 440 million children and the prevention of an estimated 6 million deaths, according to the organization.
To contact the reporter on this story: Makiko Kitamura in London at mkitamura1@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net David Risser, John Bowker
