Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13875

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Light D.
Missing the real issue about the pneumo AMC
Development Today 2008 Jun 11; XVIII:(8):11
http://www.development-today.com/magazine/2008/DT_8/Opinion/3490

Abstract:

The Advance Market Commitment that donors want to use to promote vaccines for poor children is really not about markets
at all. It is a one-time, pre-fixed buyout. If donors had started with the question of how to maximize the number of
poor children saved, the answer would not be an AMC, writes Donald Light.

Over the past few months, the GAVI Alliance and its Expert Economic Group have been working hard to address the “major
uncertainties” about how much it will cost to expand capacity to produce the new generation of pneumoccocal vaccines for
poor countries and “in finding a price that will work” for GlaxoSmithKline and Wyeth to do the job. The resulting
39-page, single-space report is all about saving the AMC mechanism and meeting the innovator companies’ demands, not
about how to maximize the number of poor children saved. That question does not get one paragraph. If it did, any
sensible person would not use an AMC approach…