The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committing $1.2 billion to eradication efforts to end wild poliovirus in the last two endemic countries — Pakistan and Afghanistan — and prevent the spread of new vaccine-derived variants of the virus such as those that have recently emerged in the United States and Europe.
Eliminating polio is among the foundation’s top health priorities.
“Polio eradication is within reach. But as far as we have come, the disease remains a threat. Working together, the world can end this disease,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, in a statement.
The pledge was announced Sunday ahead of a polio eradication pledging event that will be hosted by the German government and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI, during the World Health Summit that kicked off the same day. The Gates Foundation is a partner of GPEI, which was launched in 1988 after the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eliminate polio. The foundation has provided nearly $5 billion in total to the initiative.
GPEI’s 2022-26 strategy requires $4.8 billion in funding. That amount would help the organization reach 370 million children annually with polio vaccines and other essential services, GPEI said.
Its additional strategic goals are to merge polio campaigns with other health services and immunization programs and expand the use of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2, or nOPV2.
The new vaccine is effective against vaccine-derived poliovirus, which is different from the naturally occurring wild polio and can be spread through environmental contamination such as fecal matter from an immunized person. It was used to end an outbreak of vaccine-derived polio in Tajikistan that paralyzed at least 34 children and infected another 26 earlier this year.
The drive for more polio prevention funding is happening amid growing concerns that the virus is resurfacing in countries previously declared polio-free within unvaccinated and undervaccinated populations.
Unlike past outbreaks, the recent confirmed cases in the U.S. and U.K. are not linked to wild polio but, rather, were caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus — which does not tend to occur in high-income countries. It can emerge when a weakened strain from an oral vaccine spreads to a population with low immunization rates. Both the U.S. and U.K. were added to the World Health Organization’s outbreak list last month. Malawi and Mozambique also this year detected cases of wild polio that originated abroad.
Among the causes for this backsliding are “interruptions in routine immunization, vaccine misinformation, political unrest and the tragic flood in Pakistan,” the foundation said.
The last steps to eradicating polio are “by far the toughest” but investments in that cause will bring the world closer to that goal and “build long-term resilience by bolstering health care infrastructure and ensuring we’re prepared to respond to future pandemics,” Mark Suzman, the foundation’s CEO, said in a statement.