GAVI announced that its impact on the vaccine market is bringing down prices. The announcement was made “just before the GAVI Partners’ Forum, which unites some 400 participants from all over the world including ministers of health, donors, civil society and industry representatives, researchers and development experts.” GAVI CEO Julian Lob-Levyt said, “This is the ‘GAVI effect’ at work: encouraging and pooling growing demand from countries, attracting new manufacturers and increasing competition to drive down prices. The price drop has come later than we had hoped and it needs to fall further. But this is a clear indication that our market-shaping efforts work.”
The majority of vaccines financed through GAVI is purchased by Alliance member UNICEF. GAVI said that a recent tender for pentavalent vaccine “has shown a significant price drop with the weighted average price for 2010 falling below US$3.00, a decrease of almost 50 cents per dose on the 2009 price. This will create approximately US$55 million in savings in 2010 and enable GAVI to finance the immunisation of 6.3 million more children. UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Saad Houry commented, “This price drop is no accident, but rather the result of a strategy to leverage the purchasing power of hundreds of millions of people. Clearly, industry understands and responds to a market, regardless of whether that market is in poor or rich countries. The Alliance’s model is beginning to work, and we are optimistic that the trend will continue, as competition and demand increase over time.”
GAVI said its business model is “based on the expectation that rising demand for immunisation in developing countries induces more companies to produce vaccines, thus creating competition and driving prices down. Through the new data, success becomes evident. Whereas in 2001, there was only one company producing the pentavalent vaccine, now there are four. Two are Indian companies, whose products came on the market in 2008. Today, 50% of the vaccines funded by GAVI are from developing country manufacturers.”
At the Hanoi meeting, GAVI Board Chair Mary Robinson noted that progress in immunisation coverage and price decline must be tempered by the fact that more than 20 million children in the world today continue to go without basic life-saving vaccines.
“Our Alliance is not providing charity but rather securing a basic human right, which is the right to equal access to basic standards of health. It is time to recognise that the availability of life-saving vaccines for children worldwide, regardless of where they live, is not a luxury but a fundamental right.”
vaccines and global health :: ethics and policy 