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NEW! Donors sign agreements to boost access to life-saving vaccine
Pneumococcal bacteria cause severe pneumonia and meningitis, killing between 700,000 and one million children each year. More than 90 percent of these deaths occur in developing countries.
At the same time, a vaccine preventing pneumococcal disease has been on the market since 2000, but is only reaching Africa this year.
Donors have just signed up to a new scheme to speed up the roll-out in developing countries of a life-saving new generation vaccine. This 'advance market commitment' could be a valuable way to get newer tools to people in developing countries much faster.
But is it what the doctor ordered?
In depth
The Advance Market Commitment (AMC) is an innovative financing model that subsidises pharmaceutical companies for the development and production of new vaccines. The subsidy is meant to reduce the risk for pharmaceutical companies of investing in products for poor country markets. The subsidy is only paid once a vaccine meeting certain specifications is made available at a given price set by the donors.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
The signature of the agreements by the governments of Italy, the UK, Norway, Canada and Russia - together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - caps two years of negotiations between these donors and the GAVI Alliance, which is leading the pneumococcal vaccine AMC.
As a part of our work on the different financial mechanisms to boost access to medicines and medical innovation, the MSF Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines has been watching the project as it evolved.
Below are some of our publications on the pneumo-AMC:
Open letter to the AMC donors outlining MSF concerns over the AMC design (20 May 2007)
'Questioning the US$1.5 billion deal' The Campaign's director, Dr. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, highlights the risk that the pharmaceutical industry pockets all the AMC money in an article published in Development Today. (25 April 2008)
Read accompanying articles from Development Today.
'Advance Market Commitments: Are They Worth the Hype?' The Campaign's health economist, Laurent Gadot, questions whether AMCs are the right mechanism to ensure that newly developed health tools can be made affordable to those that need them. (May 2008)
How AMCs work and what are their flaws. An MSF note raises doubts about the ability of AMCs to stimulate research and development into neglected diseases. (2007)
(Note that the final design of the pneumo-AMC was made public on 10 July 2008. The comments above thus reflect MSF concerns over earlier AMC designs and are provided here for archiving purposes only.)
Last updated: 12 June 2009
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