A Decade of Saving Lives
The GAVI Alliance was launched in 2000, at a time when the distribution of vaccines to children in the poorest parts of the world had begun to falter. By the end of the 1990s, immunisation rates were stagnating or even declining. Nearly 30 million children born every year in developing countries were not fully immunised. With a US $ 750 million commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the vision of delivering vaccines to these children suddenly came within reach.
In GAVI’s first decade, 288 million children have been immunised against lifethreatening diseases including diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), hepatitis B, Hib and yellow fever, and more than five million future deaths have been prevented (2010 WHO estimation). GAVI has the opportunity to help countries save more lives with the introduction of two new vaccines. Pneumonia and diarrhoea are the two leading killers of children under the age of five, causing nearly 40% of all childhood deaths. Between now and 2015, GAVI can accelerate access to new vaccines that will save a further four million lives. This would have a significant impact on achieving the 4th Millennium Development Goal to reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate by 2015.
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—Myriam Miedzian, U.S. author. Boys Will Be Boys, ch. 2 (1991)
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“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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