On Wednesday 11 October, the European Union, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a new partnership, pledging €1.1 billion in investment to eradicate polio worldwide by the end of 2030.
Half of the funds will go towards the WHO’s global polio eradication initiative to vaccinate nearly 370 million children a year with RNA-messenger vaccines. The other half will be invested in strengthening health systems in the countries that need it most, the Commission stressed.
The WHO and UNICEF will be the implementing partners - the vaccination campaigns and the administration of these vaccines in this final stage of a WHO initiative that began in 1998 with conventional vaccines “and which has reduced the number of people affected by 99%”, according to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. She went on to say that: “We can put an end to the transmission of wild polio as early as this year”. She was speaking in Brussels alongside WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Bill Gates, EIB President Bernard Hoyer and UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
“Every continent should be able to produce the vaccines and medicines it needs”, she said, citing “a question of equity”. Ms von der Leyen pointed out that the Global Gateway initiative - the EU’s strategic investment plan in low- and middle-income third countries - is “investing more than €1 billion in vaccine production in Africa”, particularly in Senegal, a production site she visited last year.
“The project is progressing well and a similar project is opening very soon in Kigali” (Rwanda), she said. These local productions were highlighted by the WHO and the EU during the EU/African Union summit in February 2022 (see EUROPE 12894/1). The EU supports similar projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. And Ms von der Leyen called for everyone to get involved, because “the road to large-scale production is complex”.
This partnership shows that the EU, the EIB, the WHO and UNICEF “continue to focus on global health”, insisted the President of the European Commission.
According to Bill Gates, this year the wild polio virus has paralysed only nine people in two countries - Pakistan and Afghanistan - but “280 children have been affected by a variant”. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)