JEFFREY ROWLAND: "The biggest challenge of getting life saving vaccines to poor countries is that there's no market. People can't afford them. That's why we don't really have a malaria vaccine yet, because no one in rich countries really suffers from malaria. What we did for the pneumococcal vaccine was we said we will pay one point five billion dollars if you develop the right vaccines, and the right volumes that we need and at the right price. And it was a gamble."
That gamble paid off. GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer have agreed to provide thirty million doses of the vaccine each year for ten years. The first twenty percent of the vaccines will sell for seven dollars a dose. The remaining eighty percent will cost three dollars and fifty cents per dose. That is ninety per cent less than current prices in the United States.
Mister Rowland says the agreement is a huge achievement for the developing world.
JEFFREY ROWLAND: "Vaccination, which we tend to take for granted in countries like the United States or in Western Europe, in fact a lot of us don't even know which diseases we've been vaccinated against. That's not the case in poor countries. Vaccination is a life or death question for poor people and if you can vaccinate a child to prevent a disease from happening it is a lot more cost effective than it is to treat that disease afterwards."
And that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by June Simms. I'm Steve Ember.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25