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A Syrian student receives a polio vaccination at a school in Damascus.
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Vaccinating the world

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vaccinating the world

The United States can help save millions of lives by supporting global vaccination efforts

Here’s a horrific fact that doesn’t get a lot of headlines: More than 6 million children under age 5 die each year, many from common diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia.

Vaccines that people in industrialized nations take for granted are unavailable to millions of children in the developing world. Even polio, which should have been wiped out decades ago, continues to infect children in countries such as Somalia, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

Solving this world health crisis will take much more than scientific and medical advances. Far more important are the resources and money needed to deliver effective, low-cost vaccines, developed years ago, to children in the world’s poorest countries.

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The Geneva-based Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations has done this important work since 2000, and now supports vaccinations for nearly 60 percent of the world’s children. The global institution subsidizes immunizations in poor countries, which share the costs, and helps secure lower prices on vaccines through high-volume purchases.

The global alliance is also raising money from governments and development banks to buy millions of doses of two Ebola vaccines that could be on the market by the middle of next year.

One of the alliance’s largest donors, the United States has provided $1.2 billion to the alliance in the past decade. The Obama Administration needs to provide another $1 billion over four years, so that the alliance can keep up with the growing global demand for lifesaving vaccines.

From 2016 through 2020, the global alliance — sometimes called the Vaccine Alliance — plans to provide 2.7 billion vaccine doses that will immunize 300 million children and prevent as many as 6 million deaths. To do that, the organization needs to raise $7.5 billion. It is asking nations to support the plan at a pledging conference in Germany next month.

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Results from such aid are dramatic and measurable. Largely because more children under 5 are getting vaccinated for pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, and other diseases, 3 million fewer of them died last year than in 2000. Those gains generate billions of dollars in economic benefit to nations from health-care savings and increased economic productivity.

Nothing the United States could do with an investment of $1 billion would do more to create a better, healthier, and more-stable world than would a pledge to the global alliance for its lifesaving work.

Mr. Obama has asked Congress for more than $6 billion to fight Ebola. For a lot less, the United States can help save millions of lives, instead of hundreds, by supporting the alliance’s global efforts.

First Published December 26, 2014, 5:00 a.m.

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A Syrian student receives a polio vaccination at a school in Damascus.  (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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