Aventis Pasteur is donating 50 million doses of polio vaccine to Africa, and has reaffirmed its commitment to the world's largest private AIDS vaccine research program
The following statement was delivered by Richard Markham, chief executive officer of Aventis Pharma, at the White House on March 2, 2000.
Immunization is the most effective intervention available to stop the spread of infectious diseases. We back the Administration's call for a stepped-up public-private partnership, which would improve the lives of children in the world's poorest countries by vaccinating them with those vaccines we already have and by intensifying research on those vaccines still to come. Aventis Pasteur, as one of the world's largest developers and manufacturers of vaccines, is active in existing global efforts and joins with President Clinton, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and dozens of other organizations to say that we can, and will, do more.
There are significant barriers to achieving these goals, but we are supportive of the key points articulated by the White House: new financial commitments to purchase and deliver existing vaccines in poor countries; increased investments in health in developing nations via loans and debt forgiveness from the World Bank and other institutions and governments; increased basic research on vaccines for diseases such as HIV, malaria and TB that specifically affect developing nations; tax credits for the sales of vaccines against these three killers plus any infectious diseases causing more than one million deaths annually worldwide.
No single sector can be responsible for the enormous health problems facing developing countries nor will one answer fit all situations. Challenges include the difficult -- lack of clinics and personnel for administration or storage facilities to maintain the vaccine cold chain -- to the near impossible * political unrest and violence. But we believe that we all can do better. We want to see the same sort of progress that has been made against killer diseases in the United States occur in the world's poorest countries.
Polio Eradication -- 50 Million Doses Donated
Polio is one of the most terrible of all infectious diseases. Yet, this is a remarkable moment in public health. We are poised to eradicate wild polio from the globe in the very near future. The WHO and UNICEF-led drive to end polio in five war-torn African nations is considered key to breaking the back of wild polio transmission. To that end, Aventis Pasteur will donate 50 million doses of oral polio vaccine to be used in National Immunization Days, for which cease-fires are being negotiated. These undertakings are massive. Guns must be put down and services moved into areas in which there is no infrastructure. While this African endeavor has greater complexity than most, it is a good example of the challenges we will face in order to administer the simplest vaccines in these countries. We are proud to be part of this historic mobilization.
HIV Research and Development
As President Clinton has noted, last year in Africa, AIDS killed 10 times as many people as did war.
HIV may be the greatest health problem of our time. The virus challenges us at home and throughout the world. It threatens men, women and children and economic progress in developing countries. It has defied traditional treatment and vaccine development. There are enormous ethical, political, economic and social issues to be resolved as well and we applaud the Administration efforts in this area. We must deal with these hard issues now or else we could wind up with a scientific achievement and a public failure -- an AIDS vaccine that people will be afraid to take, be unable to pay for or be available only to a privileged few.
Aventis Pasteur is providing more than moral support. We have the broadest and deepest AIDS vaccine research program of any private organization in the world. More than half the phase one AIDS vaccine clinical trials around the world use one or more of the company's candidate vaccines. We are working on multiple strategies as well -- naked DNA, alphaviruses that may in fact provide a greater margin of safety, and poxviruses used as vectors, among others Some of these strategies are being studied in combination with others, some alone, and some with other manufacturers. We are in clinical trials in Africa, Asia, the United States, Europe and soon, the Caribbean and hope to start phase III efficacy trials with one of our approaches next year.
The research is expensive and the commercial potential risky. While we believe that the approaches we are developing for HIV will have application for other diseases such as malaria, there are no guarantees.
That's why it is so important for all of those who can -- whether from the public or private sector -- to contribute to this effort.