High vaccine prices ignored by ‘Decade of Vaccines’ blueprint

Governments meeting at the World Health Organization’s Executive Board (WHO EB) must seize the opportunity to improve serious shortcomings in the document that will drive the global community’s vaccines response in the next few years. If they fail to do so, key reasons why children continue to be missed by immunisation programmes will be left unaddressed. Countries are discussing the monitoring and evaluation framework that will assess the success and steer the activities of the ‘Global Vaccine Action Plan’. Although high vaccine prices pose a considerable threat to the sustainability of vaccine programmes, the framework does not include any measures to monitor prices at all. “The cost of vaccinating a child has risen by 2,700 percent over the last decade, so it is puzzling that the vaccines blueprint for the next decade does not have a goal to bring prices down,” said Dr. Manica Balasegaram, Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières’ Access...