agrogersInformation on how many lives vaccines have saved can be found here.
Transcripts
Bill Gates explains how vaccines work
I often talk about how vaccines are a miracle. They’ve saved millions of lives. But exactly how do they work? Well, they connect to the human immune system, which is itself, really phenomenal. So, when a germ gets inside and attacks your body, the immune system sees unusual foreign shapes on the surface and then special cells in your body called white blood cells create antibodies that connect up. Then your immune system knows to go and kill this foreign object. The idea of the vaccine is instead of having to get sick the first time, to develop this immunity, we take something that looks like a foreign bug, teach the immune system the shape of this foreign object so it’s ready to attack with antibodies very, very quickly when the real bug shows up. So, you can avoid lots of diseases, if you’ve been properly vaccinated. And that’s why Gavi was created. Gavi came up with the money and a plan to get vaccines out to all the kids of the world. If you go back to 1990, about 9% of all children died before the age of five. Now, that number is about 4% and these vaccines, that Gavi got out, have been critical to that. So, it really is a miracle. You can read more about vaccines and the investments we’ve made at GatesLetter.com.
Bill Gates Pledges $1 Billion Dollars For Vaccines
well good morning this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a long time a lot of Seir have been talking over the months ahead trying to make sure that we get everyone to show up and and do absolutely the best they can for vaccination a little word when we were driving in this morning to see a lot of protesters out there on the street and I thought geez what what could they say about vaccines well in fact what they were saying is they love vaccines and they were encouraging us all here to make this support and so organizations that have gathered that positive energy and support for this like one and save the children and it’s fantastic to see we’ve heard from some great speakers this morning people who are leading the way the UK in terms of making increases Norway is the the most generous donor and you’ll hear from others later who are really pushing hard to come up with the resources to save these children these are tough budget times and so I know it it takes a lot but we’re gonna see the the value of that in terms of what gobby’s able to achieve this vaccine work is the biggest program for the Gates Foundation and that’s because it is so impactful it’s incredible value it utterly changes the country to have the newest vaccines saving children’s lives and equally important avoiding children getting sick so much that they never fully developed on their mental and physical capacities this actually goes back to the very beginning of our foundation my wife in London and I found out about a disease called rotavirus that was killing a half million children a year and we said this is stunning we’ve never heard of it and we looked into how much work was being done to solve this disease to get a vaccine out to the poorest countries and we found that there was very little and so we knew that we’d found the cause that we could take all the resources we were lucky enough to have and give them back to the world in an impactful way and so it’s a wonderful milestone to be here today getting the pledges that will make sure that every child in the world can have that rotavirus vaccine now gobby is a is a great investment because it really gets into the countries and gets these new vaccines out there in the last decade that’s been the case in the decade ahead we have these additional vaccines and it’s been a shame that in some cases countries have applied to gobby but because of financial limitations we haven’t been able to approve their applications for the new vaccines and so when we saw that a year ago we said we’ve got to rally around and make sure that doesn’t happen again and that’s why we set a very ambitious goal for today’s conference a lot of people said don’t you understand this is a tough time to be doing this and we said absolutely but we knew that the the facts were on our side we also have had great support from the vaccine manufacturers in terms of continuing to get the prices down and so that makes all of this possible we also have ambitious goals for getting vaccine coverage up it’s wonderful that it’s up at 80% but gobby working with key partners in particular WH o and and UNICEF can get that even higher and so today gives us resources that will go into that so how do how do we look at the timeline well going back to 2000 that’s when Gavi was first established within five years they had gotten hepatitis-b moth ‘less influenza hip and yellow fever out to lots and lots of people it’s now that we’re gonna start to get the last two vaccines that rich kids take for granted the pneumococcus and and rotavirus and over these next five years get them out to every child everywhere that means for the first time ever that we have equity in vaccines that we don’t take the poorest children who are actually the most susceptible to these diseases and the benefit of giving them the vaccine is the highest and yet in the past they’ve been the ones who don’t get it and so it it really is in the achievement of equity this is a very important day in our foundation wants to do its part and so I’m pleased to announce to you that we’re pledging an additional billion dollars just thank you all right thank you it’s not everyday we give away billions of dollars but for a cause like this it’s it’s exciting to be doing it so that’ll be over the the next five years 50 million of that will be set aside for the kind of matching that you’ve heard about that the UK is it’s also encouraging and we have people like Letitia who’s already taking advantage of that match program with the generous gift they’re giving so we think that as a creative structure now you can look at this gift in terms of the the money you can look at it in terms of the 46 million children that will get these vaccines or you can look at it at the the 700,000 lives that will be saved or the additional kids who because they’ll be healthy will end up contributing so much more to the world I also think that with the momentum we have here that it will really spur on the great research going on to create new vaccines we don’t yet have a malaria vaccine but there’s a lot of work great work going on we have work going on for other diseases as well and all the different scientists we’ll see based on the what’s being pledged today that when they have those breakthroughs the world is willing to step up and make sure that all the kids who need these vaccines will get them thank you
Bill Gate: Vaccines Saves Lives
Saving lives is not easy sometimes we don’t know how to prevent disease or death which is tragic but there are millions of lives we know exactly how to save we can save them easily and cost-effectively with vaccines I like to say that vaccines are miracles they’re miracles because giving children a couple of drops or a shot in the arm can prevent some of the worst childhood diseases for a lifetime and that to me is a miracle measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world but just two shots make a child immune measles forever and each dose costs just 18 cents because of this vaccine the number of children who die from measles has gone down from two and a half million to less than 200,000 in less than 30 years one of the greatest vaccine stories is plain out right now it’s the story of polio most people don’t know that polio cases are down 99% worldwide there are only four countries in the world where transmission of the disease has never been stopped those four are Afghanistan Pakistan India and Nigeria only one disease has ever been completely eradicated that smallpox and because of vaccination polio is on the threshold of being the second the polio campaign takes an enormous commitment in India for example there are 2 million volunteers working in the fight against polio twice a year they set up 800,000 vaccination booths around the country at schools hospitals and community centers after that they visit more than 200 million houses one by one then they go to train stations bus stations and ferry terminals to put polio drops in the mouths of all the children all that hard work is paying off just 41 kids in India suffered from polio in 2010 I feel confident that in you will soon stop transmission of polio entirely with numbers that low it’s tempting to say we’ve done enough it’s not worth putting in the enormous effort to take care of the last few pockets of polio there are two reasons why that’s the wrong way to look at it the first reason is that it’s impossible to keep polio at these low levels indefinitely over time the virus would spread back into countries where it’s been eliminated like it did in Russia last year and will back to the days when polio was a terrifying threat for millions of families we have seen that polio anywhere is a threat everywhere the second reason we can’t stop now is that finishing the job will energize the whole world around the great cause of saving children’s lives big victories like eradicating a disease make us proud of what human beings are able to do for one another and that pride inspires us to do even more vaccines save lives they’re the simplest most inexpensive most effective way to give all children a shot at a healthy productive life you
