The international organization Gavi (Vaccine Alliance) announced Tuesday that it has supported the routine immunization of more than one billion children in the world since its creation in 2000, saving the lives of 17 million of them.
On the occasion of the publication of a new report on its activities, Gavi stated that it is “on track to achieve most of its strategic objectives by 2025”.
Since its inception, Gavi has contributed to the routine immunization of more than a billion children, while also enabling billions of essential vaccines in emergencies or pandemics.
Each year, this public-private partnership, which brings together donor and recipient countries, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, delivers vaccines that protect half the world’s children against some of the deadliest diseases.
According to Gavi, preliminary data show a recovery in routine immunization coverage in 2022 in the 57 countries benefiting from the organization’s help, after the drop observed between 2020 and 2021 due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Vaccination coverage levels thus tend to approach their historical reference level,” according to the organization.
In addition to its involvement in basic childhood immunization, Gavi manages stocks of vaccines against cholera, yellow fever, invasive meningococcal infections and Ebola virus disease.
Gavi also played a key role in the Covax mechanism, which aimed to provide populations in poor countries with vaccines against Covid-19, to which governments did not have access.
While its effectiveness has been hit hard by supply difficulties in India and mistrust of vaccines in certain countries, Covax “delivered nearly two billion doses, thus averting 2.7 million deaths in 92 low-income countries.” ”, the report says.
The document also shows that, despite the enormous pressure placed on countries’ health systems by the Covid-19 pandemic, Gavi has met or even exceeded the schedule of most of the commitments it made for the period 2021-2025. . These include vaccinating an additional 300 million children, thus preventing between seven and eight million deaths in the long term.
Source: TSF
