Context

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged $15 million as India’s contribution to the Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, at the Global Vaccine Summit hosted by United Kingdom.

About

Highlights

• PM Modi addressed the Global Vaccine Summit hosted by United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
• The summit was held virtually in view of the global lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
• Over 50 countries - business leaders, UN agencies, civil society, government ministers, Heads of State, and country leaders participated in the virtual summit.
• A $2bn procurement fund aimed at ensuring that poorer countries can access doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine has been announced.
• The summit separately raised $8.8bn, above the target of $7.4bn, for the private-public alliance’s general work on immunising millions of people worldwide from longstanding diseases such as measles.
• The summit, the third replenishment summit since Gavi was formed 20 years ago, took on an extra significance as world leaders battle to set up a mechanism to ensure that any effective coronavirus vaccine is produced at a scale possible to ensure it is not just distributed to the countries that either can afford it or have invested in its research.

What is Gavi?

• Created in 2000, Gavi is an international organisation - a global Vaccine Alliance, bringing together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries.
• Since its creation, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than 760 million children in the world’s poorest countries, preventing more than 13 million deaths. 
• Gavi now vaccinates almost half of the world’s children, giving it tremendous power to negotiate vaccines at prices that are affordable for the poorest countries and to remove the commercial risks that previously kept manufacturers from serving them.

What is Gavi doing to fight COVID-19?

• Health systems across the developing world face their biggest test in living memory, and Gavi is helping them to meet it.
• Gavi has committed to providing an initial amount of over US$42 million in urgent fundingto 30 countries, which will support countries in their response to COVID-19 by enabling them to protect healthcare workers with PPE, perform trainings, and fund diagnostic tests.
• Gavi is seeking to provide additional support to its beneficiary countries and funding up to US$200 million is likely be approved in the near future.

Role of vaccination

• Vaccines are one of the most successful developments in modern medicine, averting up to an estimated 3 million deaths every year.
• Vaccination has made possible the eradication of smallpox, and it is close to doing the same for polio.
• Annual measles deaths have been reduced from 2.6 million in the 1980s to an estimated 110?000 in 2017.
• Child mortality has declined by more than 50% since 1990, largely related to the reduction in disability and death from vaccine-preventable diseases.
• Immunization is the process whereby a person is made immune or resistant to an infectious disease, typically by the administration of a vaccine. Vaccines stimulate the body’s own immune system to protect the person against subsequent infection or disease.
• India is also the World’s foremost producer of vaccines and that it is fortunate to contribute to the immunization of about 60 percent of the World’s children.