UK government to finance vaccine drive by bond sales: model for global AIDS treatment?

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The British government is to become the first nation to use the international bond market as a direct mechanism to raise money for a developing country public health programme, according to London’s Guardian newspaper.

The vaccination programme will be launched next year as a public-private partnership between the British and French governments and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, together with the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

GAVI will fund vaccination programmes in 56 low-income countries backed by $400 million a year from donors and up to ten times that amount raised from selling bonds. Banks and investment funds would be repaid would be repaid after ten to fifteen years.

Glossary

UNAIDS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) brings together the resources of ten United Nations organisations in response to HIV and AIDS.

immunisation

Immunisation is the process whereby a person is made immune or resistant to an infectious disease, typically by the administration of a vaccine. Vaccines stimulate the body’s own immune system to protect the person against subsequent infection or disease.

 

low income countries

The World Bank classifies countries according to their income: low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high. While the majority of the approximately 30 countries that are ranked as low income are in sub-Saharan Africa, many African countries including Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia are in the middle-income brackets. 

The mechanism is a prototype for the International Finance Facility advocated by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. It seeks to raise large amounts of money quickly to ramp up global spending on infectious diseases, especially HIV and AIDS treatment. UNAIDS estimates that $20 billion a year will be needed to fund HIV treatment, care and prevention by 2007. While some of that money will come from developing country governments, UNAIDS notes that the gap between sums pledged by wealthy nations and sums needed to control the epidemic will widen in the next few years.