“The United States won’t contribute anymore to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, until the global health organization has ‘re-earned the public trust,’ U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said” on June 25. Politico reports that Kennedy “criticized what he alleged are Gavi’s ‘questionable recommendations encouraging pregnant women to receive Covid-19 vaccines.’ There are things he ‘admires’ about Gavi, Kennedy said, such as its commitment to make medicine affordable to all. But in its attempt to promote universal vaccination, he accused Gavi of having ‘neglected the key issue of vaccine safety.'”
Surgeon Atul Gawande calls this cut-off “a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of Gavi. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1 billion children, & averted 19 million deaths. This pull out will cost hundreds of thousands of children’s lives a year – and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.”
This cut-off seems like the tail wagging the dog, to let concerns about one recent vaccine interfere with support for other vaccines that are safe and effective and have been used for many years with universal support from medical experts. Most vaccines are far more effective than the Covid-19 vaccine, which often didn’t prevent infection (moreover, Covid-19 got milder over time). So any issues Kennedy had with the Covid-19 vaccine are no reason to cut off funding for more effective, life-saving vaccines.
Other vaccines have saved millions of lives. For example, “Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children,” reports Our World in Data. Of the lives saved by vaccination, around 60% are saved by the measles vaccine. Globally, vaccination against measles has risen from under 20% in 2000 to more than 70% today.
Measles vaccines rank the highest in the total number of lives saved. Measles is especially contagious and deadly. The virus depletes immune cells, making it harder to fight off measles and making other infections much more life-threatening. It can also erase immune memory to infections and vaccines that children have already encountered.
Before vaccines, almost all children caught measles, and it was a common cause of disability and death. With high measles vaccination rates, millions of lives are saved globally each year.
Of the lives saved by vaccination, about 60% are saved by the measles vaccine, according to Our World in Data. Globally, vaccination against measles has risen from under 20% in 2000 to more than 70% today.
Infant mortality rates have fallen dramatically over the last 50 years. Worldwide, they have fallen by more than two-thirds, from 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today. Researchers say vaccinations have cut infant mortality by 40%. “The rest of the decline has been driven by other factors, including improved nutrition, prenatal and neonatal care, access to clean water and sanitation, and other basic resources.”
A half century ago, few kids were vaccinated outside of Europe and North America. Less than 5% of infants got the vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DTP3).
In 1974, the World Health Assembly “formed the Essential Programme on Immunization, which aimed to vaccinate all children in the world against the main diseases for which vaccines exist, such as measles, tetanus, tuberculosis, and smallpox. Soon after, vaccination rates increased steeply — expanding to over 60% of the world’s children.”
It would be nice if some billionaire philanthropist would step up to provide funding for Gavi, to replace the lost funding that will result from the U.S. cutting off support for Gavi. CBS News notes:
The Biden administration had committed to $1.6 billion in funding for Gavi from 2026 through 2030 — an amount roughly equal to the funding pledged by the private Gates Foundation — and shock and outrage reverberated…after Kennedy’s announcement [that funding would be cut off].
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, said on social media that the move would have “devastating consequences.” He called on the U.S. Congress to keep funding Gavi, warning that if it did not, “more sick kids will fall behind in school,” and there would be “more overcrowded hospital wards and eventually more grieving parents.”
“If Congress allows this to happen, the consequences will be devastating,” Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said. “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of preventable deaths will occur, especially among mothers and children.”
Recently, lung cancer vaccine trials were launched in seven nations. The Guardian reported:
Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumors have spread, are particularly poor. Experts are testing a new [vaccine] that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
African nations are rolling out a new vaccine against malaria. “Two new vaccines give hope” in the fight against malaria, reported The Economist last year:
The first, RTS,S, has been tried on nearly 2m children in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi since 2019, and is being used in seven more countries this year. The second, R21/Matrix-M, which is being made in larger volumes at less than half the price, started shipping on May 24th to the Central African Republic…..
When a mosquito infected with malaria bites a person, it injects a few dozen sporozoites into the bloodstream. These long, sprightly forms of the parasitic protozoan reach the liver within an hour; there the parasite transforms and multiplies, causing infection and sometimes death. Stop the parasite early, when the sporozoites are few in number, and disease is averted.
That is the premise of both new vaccines, which create antibodies that attach to sporozoites of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, responsible for almost all of the deaths globally. The first to arrive was RTS,S which was developed in 1987 by GSK, a British company, and recommended by the WHO in 2021. Combining it with antimalarial drugs in places with high seasonal transmission of the disease reduced malaria episodes and deaths in young children by nearly two-thirds, compared with jabs or antimalarial drugs alone. Adding bed nets probably raised protection to more than 90%.”
In July, “the Ivory Coast became the first country to officially deploy the R21 vaccine, a new and powerful weapon against malaria. This is not the first malaria vaccine. Its predecessor, known as RTS,S or Mosquirix, is already available in many African countries. However, R21 is superior in two important ways. First, it is more potent, showing greater and longer-lasting protection in trials. Second, at under four dollars a dose, it is far cheaper. According to an analysis from 1 Day Sooner, a health policy non-profit, R21 can save a healthy year of life for 39 US dollars, compared to 129 dollars for the RTS,S vaccine. That puts R21 on par with bed nets, the most cost-effective intervention. With international support, R21 should reach over six million children by 2025, and this is likely just the beginning. The manufacturer, Serum Institute of India, has already produced 25 million doses and plans to produce up to 100 million annually in anticipation of large-scale roll-outs.”
