Media/Policy Watch
This section is intended to alert readers to substantive news, analysis and opinion from the general media on vaccines, immunization, global; public health and related themes. Media Watch is not intended to be exhaustive, but indicative of themes and issues CVEP is actively tracking. This section will grow from an initial base of newspapers, magazines and blog sources, and is segregated from Journal Watch above which scans the peer-reviewed journal ecology.

We acknowledge the Western/Northern bias in this initial selection of titles and invite suggestions for expanded coverage. We are conservative in our outlook in adding news sources which largely report on primary content we are already covering above. Many electronic media sources have tiered, fee-based subscription models for access. We will provide full-text where content is published without restriction, but most publications require registration and some subscription level.

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Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
Accessed 11 June 2016
Essay June 5, 2016
The Innovative Finance Revolution
Private Capital for the Public Good
By Georgia Levenson Keohane and Saadia Madsbjerg
…To help ensure that this money would be spent in the most cost-effective way, IFFIm partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a nonprofit that is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and that specializes in large-scale immunization programs and creative ways to fund them. IFFIm’s bond issues helped Gavi increase its annual budget from $227 million in 2006 to $1.5 billion in 2015 and expand programs such as a polio eradication initiative that has financed the development and testing of new vaccines and the stockpiling of proven ones in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India.

A 2011 evaluation of IFFIm conducted by the health-care consulting company HLSP (now part of Mott MacDonald) credited IFFIm with saving at least 2.75 million lives and improving the quality of millions more….

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New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/
Accessed 11 June 2016
June 10, 2016
The Mistrust of Science
By Atul Gawande
Science has never been more powerful, but it is under attack.
…Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumps that, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths.

People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”…

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New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Accessed 11 June 2016
Africa
Fake Vaccination Papers Let Yellow Fever Spread in Angola
By REUTERS JUNE 10, 2016, 9:48 A.M. E.D.T.
LUANDA — The world’s worst yellow fever outbreak in decades took hold in an Angolan slum because its early victims were Eritrean migrants whose false vaccination papers sent doctors off on the wrong path for weeks, international health officials said.

The flare-up of the mosquito-borne disease has killed 325 people in Angola, spread as far as China – which has close commercial links with oil-rich Angola – and raised fears of the world running out of vaccine, but it might have been stopped in its tracks if it had been identified quickly in Luanda.

Since the outbreak was identified in January, 10.5 million Angolans – 40 percent of the population – have been vaccinated and the World Health Organization (WHO) plans to cover the rest of the war-scarred country by the end of the year.

But with a reported case this week of the disease jumping via a mosquito from one person to another in Kinshasa, a city of over 12 million in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, there are concerns about global vaccine supplies running out.

Luanda WHO representative Hernando Agudelo said he and government experts thought they were dealing with a mystery disease when unexplained deaths first surfaced in Km 30, part of the capital’s sprawling Viana district, in mid-December.

“The first people that we found with this strange way of dying, this syndrome, they had vaccination cards,” Agudelo told Reuters. “The first meeting with the minister, we were analysing ‘What the hell is it?'”…

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Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Accessed 11 June 2016
Vaccine developer gets $7.5 million in government loans to expand in Montgomery
Novavax to add 850 new jobs while remaining in Gaithersburg, officials said.
Bill Turque | Local-Politics | Jun 8, 2016