Geneva:
The United States that cut financing to Gavi, an organization that provides vaccines to the poorest countries in the world, can lead to more than a million deaths and will endanger life everywhere, warned the CEO of the group on Thursday.
The news that Washington intends to end the financing for Gavi, reported for the first time in the New York Times, comes as the two -month -old government of President Donald Trump, reduces foreign help aggressive.
The decision was included in a spreadsheet of 281 pages that sent the seriously taken American Bureau for International Development to the congress on Monday evening.
Gavi's Chief Executive Sania Nishtar told AFP that the Alliance “had not received a termination message from the US government”.
The Alliance was “busy with the White House and the Congress with a view to securing $ 300 million approved by the congress for our 2025 activities and financing in the longer term,” said Nishtar.
“A reduction in the financing of GAVI from the US would have a disastrous impact on global health security, which may result in more than a million deaths by preventing diseases and endangering lives everywhere, of the outbreaks of dangerous diseases,” she said.
Health experts and organizations have warned that reducing GAVI financing would ultimately cost the world more money and reduce a quarter of a century of progress in the fight against many deadly diseases.
Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor in epidemiology at Brown University in the United States, said that it would have “astonishingly short -sighted proposal” “Destructive consequences for children's health everywhere”.
“The American support for GAVI's vaccination efforts is not a charity-it is a cost-effective investment to prevent deadly and expensive outbreaks that can come here,” she said AFP.
'Cruel'
Gavi says it helps to vaccinate more than half of the children of the world against infectious diseases, including COVID-19, Ebola, malaria, rabies, polio, cholera, tuberculosis (TB), typhus and yellow fever.
The United States currently offers about a quarter of the GAVI budget, a public-private partnership with head office in Geneva.
David Elliman, health care researcher at University College London, said that cutting the financing is “not only cruel, but is not only in the interest of someone”.
“If diseases such as measles and tuberculosis increase all over the world, it is a danger to all of us,” he told the Science Media Center, adding that measles were already increasing in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
In the light of the radical aid programs of the Trump government, “his institutions are reluctant to pronounce the target and individuals are self-censing to protect themselves,” said Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccin Group.
“We have to wake up with the moral matter for supporting the remarkable global health efforts that help the arms of the world, but also remember that it is in our own interest,” he added.
“As the COVID-19 Pandemie remembers us, bothering infectious diseases and we all endanger ourselves.”
'We will regret this'
Various health researchers also said that the cutbacks would be a bad return on the investment.
For every $ 1 that is spent on vaccinations in developing countries where GAVI is active, $ 21 is saved this decade in “health care costs, lost wages and lost productivity due to illness and death,” estimates the vaccine group.
A report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently showed that the costs that have been averted by vaccine programs in 73 countries will yield to nearly $ 782 billion in the following decade.
Craig Spencer, a doctor and Ebola survivor at Brown University, said that the loss of American support to Gavi means that “children will die”.
He also warned that Gavi maintains the global stock of vaccines for diseases, including Ebola, cholera, yellow fever and more.
“We will regret this,” wrote Spencer on X.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
