Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It is my great pleasure to invite to the stage Prime Minister from the UK,
David Cameron, and my husband Bill Gates.
It was just last year that Bill and I were here at the World Economic Forum talking
about this decade of vaccines and our vision for what the next ten years could
hold in terms of promise for vaccines.
To think about a child getting - every child getting - the right vaccination
and new vaccines being created for the developing world.
What I would like to talk about for just a minute today is the remarkable progress
that has been made even in just one year. So, to give you a couple of specific
examples: in Burkino Faso, Mali and Niger a brand new vaccine came out this year for
Meningitis A and was delivered, just this fall, to 19.5 million people that live in
that meningitis belt: that is one thing that has happened.
The second thing that has happened is that we are finally, as a world, delivering
a pneumococcus vaccine with the specific strains for Africa. It has taken us some
time to get this vaccine created, but once we got it in the developed world, it has
taken us only one to two years to get it out to the developing world.
1.6 million children are afflicted with pneumonia and die of it every year
and this vaccine will take us a long way in reducing those childhood deaths.
So, in fact, just before I came to World Economic Forum, I was in Kenya and Ghana;
in Kenya specifically to see the roll-out of this vaccine and it is really something
to see; a brand new vaccine coming out in an
African nation. It will now come out, this year, in
a whole host of African nations
The third thing I will say is the amazing progress we have made on polio this year.
There are four countries where polio is still endemic and two of those countries,
India and Nigeria, have made tremendous progress this year.
They have brought their polio cases down by over 90%.
So Bill and I are so excited to see the remarkable progress that has happened,
just in one year, and we are incredibly excited about the next nine years.
So, with that, I will invite Bill up to talk a bit more about polio.
Well, thank you.
The Gates Foundation does a lot of things in global health, but the thing that has
become our top priority, because of the incredible opportunity and the need to act
now, is this polio eradication. Of course, in a lot of countries you
haven't seen polio for a long time, but in 1988 when the eradication campaign
started, there were over 300,000 cases year. Now, at that time, they thought they
could get it done in twelve years and they did a great job.
This is a campaign that is spearheaded by the World Health Organization and Margaret
Chan and her team have done a fantastic job, their key partners, UNICEF, and an
amazing partnership with Rotary International. Rotary not only has raised
a lot of money for this campaign, but the Rotary members all over the world speak
out, volunteer and have made a huge difference. So where are we?
We are down to having 1% as many cases as we had when we started, so only a few
thousand a year. The four countries that have never
interrupted it are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. As Melinda said,
2010 was a great year in India and Nigeria; over an 80% reduction in those
countries. Now, as long as it is in those four countries it will spread out to
different places, so you can get outbreaks. We had one in Tajikistan in the
first half of the year; we had one in Congo that started in the
second half of the year. We need to take these next few years
and intensify the campaign.
It is an expensive campaign: it costs almost a billion a year to buy the drops,
to get the vaccinations out there, to find all the children.
If you don't find more than 10% of the children, then you do not interrupt the
transmission. We had a change in vaccine to make it more targeted to the varieties
of polio that are in specific places and that is one of the reason a why 2010 was
such a successful year. There will be plenty of challenges,
there will be setbacks in this thing as we go forward, find cases, but the team working
on this is very smart. The way they tune the budget on this thing
is very impressive and certainly I am going to do everything I can: visiting
Nigeria, going to India, pushing this thing forward, because we are really proud
to be a partner in this effort.
In order to make sure that there is financial strength to this, we are going
to have to turn to the people who have been giving and ask them to step up;
we are going to have to get some new donors. I was in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday,
that was a great thing because the Crown Prince there stepped up with 50 million;
a third of it for the polio campaign and two thirds for overall vaccination
campaigns. So it is wonderful to see somebody who has not been involved in this
saying, ‘Yes, I want to come in, in these last two years and help out, get this
thing across the finish line'.
The last time a disease was eradicated - it was the only time - was back in 1979
when smallpox was eradicated and what happened right after that was that UNICEF
and the rest of the world took on a goal of increasing the impact of vaccines.
Under Jim Grant's leadership from 1980 to 1995, they got vaccines out to a lot of
kids. I think the same analogy applies here; it is a tough economic decade,
just like the 80s, but when we get this done it will energise things.
So we have all the benefits; we have the benefit of no kid dying or
being paralysed, we have got the benefits of getting rid of the special costs we are
undergoing now and we will energise the global health system as we show that even
something very hard like this can absolutely get done.
I mention that these are tough times in terms of budgets and people will look at
their aid budgets as part of their review process and that is why we need to do
a good job explaining incredible things that this money can do.
A country that has really set a leadership example and, I think, personally deserves
our praise for his personal role is the UK and Prime Minister David Cameron. It
is really something and so I am very pleased to have him here.
I should mention that our foundation is adding 100 million today to the polio
campaign and that is to help close the gap. So let me bring the Prime Minister up
to share his thoughts.
Thank you very much, Bill, thank you for that. Let me start by paying a huge
tribute to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, to Rotary International and to
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the incredible work that you have done in
the fight against polio and other preventable diseases.
I don't want to take up a huge amount of your time today;
I just want to try and answer, I think, the absolutely key questions about this.
The first is, why is it we should spend aid money really going after preventable
diseases? Secondly, why eradication? And third, important for the politicians
here, how do we take our countries and our publics with us as we do this absolutely
vital work? Why disease and why do I think what the
Gates Foundation and what GAVI and the Global Fund and others are doing is so
worthwhile? Well, you can have all the debates in the world about whether
development happens best if you have a green revolution first or whether aid
is the key or trade is the key. You don't have any development if people
are dying of preventable diseases. So I think it absolutely has to be the
first line in all our development policies and I think the impetus that it is now
being given is completely right. Diseases don't just kill people, they deny
countries of productive labour. It also isolates countries and makes
further development impossible.
Why eradication?
Why, when we have got so far, is it right to put the extra money in to finish the
job? Well, I think the words are there; it is about finishing the jobs.
If you don't do it, there is always the chance that it will rise again, that it
will spread to other countries. And we know we can do it;
we did it with smallpox, it can be done. We know we can do it with polio and I
think Bill has, very clearly, set out the way ahead.
I think we need to go this extra mile, put that extra money in and make sure that it
can be done.
How do we take people with us as we do this? Well, as I've explained, I think
actually disease eradication, vaccination, is one of the easiest things to sell to
a sceptical public, because you know how much a vaccine costs, you know how many
people you can vaccinate, you know how many lives that you can save and I think
that it is an incredibly clear argument. Because people worry about their tax
pounds or their tax dollars going in aid, they worry about corruption, they worry
about dictators - and they are quite right to worry about that - but with vaccination
you can count the pounds and the pennies, the dollars and the cents and you can
count the vaccinations that take place.
What Britain is going to do is to double our commitment to the polio eradication
initiative from 30 million dollars to 60 million dollars.
This will enable us to vaccinate an extra 45 million children, but we are placing
two conditions on it and I think these are important. First is: it is vital, if we
are going to eradicate polio, that we make sure vaccination becomes routine in the
countries where it has been endemic. I think it is very important we insist on
good policy to follow the good money. The second condition is this: that we are
putting in this money on the basis that each pound that goes in leverages in five
pounds from other donors. I made this condition for a very good
reason. We have made a difficult decision in the United Kingdom; you might have
heard me this morning talking about difficult budget cuts, difficult decisions
we have to make to get on top of our deficit. Yet while doing this, we are one
country - and sadly one of the only countries - that are committed to meeting
the 0.7% target of gross national income by 2013.
I think it is right, even in difficult times, that we don't break our promises to
the poorest people on our planet. I would also argue that there is a strong
element of self-interest in this. If we give up on the aid and the trade
and the development agenda, we will find the problems in those countries visited on our
own doorstep. So I hope that other leaders will be able
to make this commitment and, by asking that the money we are putting into polio
eradication levers in money from other organisations and other countries, I hope
will make this happen. In fact, I did a little bit of research
today and I worked out that if the other leading European countries met the pledge
that we have all made of 0.7% of our gross national income, by the end of 2013,
all 69 million children who are currently out of school could be in school, 350 million
people that don't have access to clean water could have access to clean water
and we would have another 120,000 women every year who would not die in childbirth.
Those are the levels of achievement we could make if we all keep our promises to
the poorest in our world. Yes, it is a difficult time to do it,
but actually there is never the wrong time to do the right thing.
Thank you very much.