The most crucial part of next year’s federal budget

[Dane Valerie]

Link post

This Vox article by Dylan Matthews provides an excellent overview of why funding Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, is one of the most impactful things the US government does. Gavi has a proven track record of cost-effectively saving millions of lives by providing access to essential vaccines in the world’s poorest countries.

Gavi is currently seeking $9billion in funding for its 2026-2030 budget, which includes over $1 billion for the newly approved malaria vaccines. Despite some concerns about “donor fatigue,” there appears to be strong bipartisan support in Congress for meeting or even exceeding the Biden administration’s $1.58 billion pledge to Gavi.

However, the article argues that even this level of funding may not be sufficient to fully take advantage of the new malaria vaccines’ potential. With more support, Gavi could theoretically vaccinate up to 29 million children per year against malaria.

[Mo Putera]

Thanks for sharing the article. I found these paragraphs particularly sobering:

In the nearer term, the situation is bleaker. The advocacy group 1DaySooner has been pushing a goal of vaccinating 50 million children this year and the next (2024 and 2025). That takes 200 million doses, which Serum claims it can produce. But Gavi only projects a total of only 2 million immunized children from 2021 and 2025, or 25 times fewer children than theoretically could be vaccinated with more funding. …

Funding the standard vaccines is great. But every 100,000 kids vaccinated with R21 means 629 fewer kids dead from malaria. The 48 million kid gap between 1DaySooner’s vaccination goal and Gavi’s current plans for this year and next, then, represents about 300,000 additional dead kids. Those are lives we can save with sufficient investment.

As Jacob Trefethen, a funder of global health research at Open Philanthropy, recently asked, “Are we, as a country, as a world, really going to let money be the blocker to kids getting a malaria vaccine?”

Saving 300k children’s lives would reduce under-5 malaria deaths worldwide by a staggering ~70%.