ABSTRACT
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched “the Decade of the Vaccines” by pledging $10 billion over the next ten years, in addition to the $4.5 billion that the foundation had already committed, to support worldwide efforts to develop and deliver vaccines to the world's poorest countries during the next decade (https://csis.org/files/publication/111205_Cochi_FutureGlobalImmun_Web.pdf). For the WEF, this extraordinary economic commitment was critical because they view childhood immunization as “one of the most successful and cost-effective of all health interventions,” preventing an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide (ibid.).
