‘Fate often takes a hand in these things’, says the eminent Australian immunologist, Sir Gustav Nossal when describing the way he landed on his professional feet after more than 30 years at a Melbourne research institute.
‘My biggest bit of good luck was that my retirement coincided more or less with the time Bill Gates was building up his foundation’, he says.
As chairman of a group of experts advising the US$2 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Child Vaccine Program, Nossal is at the forefront of a renewed campaign to immunise children across the Third World. A major initiative that Nossal says came about through a conversation.
‘One day a person in the WHO Secretariat in Geneva said, “Look, my sister lives in Seattle and I’m going to see her for a holiday, while I’m there is there any point in going to see the Gates Foundation?”’ Struggling to raise funds for immunisation programs within the UN system, Nossal immediately said yes.
Two factors prompted a positive reception with the Microsoft chief and his wife, Melinda, Nossal suggests. The ‘tremendous cost-effectiveness of vaccines’ but also, the couple’s personal circumstances: ‘the fact they had started parenthood late’. But, of course, there is more to this story than fate.
In the early 1990s, many within the global vaccine community were starting to feel that the global immunisation push had stalled. Some countries were suffering ‘donor fatigue’, while others were either unable, or unwilling to lift their immunisation rates.
Moreover, there was a widely held belief that the ‘bottle-neck’ reflected an under-utilisation of those drugs already available.
At the São Paulo meeting of the Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI) in 1997, Gus Nossal gave voice to these concerns. Talk of a crisis in the area is no exaggeration. Of the 130 million children born each year, 91 million are born in the developing world, according to WHO figures. One third of these newborns will never be immunised.
Two years after Sir Gus Nossal spoke at the São Paulo conference, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) was launched. Its objective is to ensure every child in the world is protected against vaccine-preventable diseases, regardless of where they are born. Operating as a financial lever behind the new alliance was the Gates Foundation’s Global Fund for Children’s Vaccines, which was established with an initial grant of US$750 million.
Sir Gus Nossal says this renewed effort is motivated by