The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will this year step up its efforts to try to rid the world of the poliovirus, the potentially debilitating disease that has evaded full eradication and has even recently resurfaced in some parts of the world where it was previously eliminated.
The foundation is working with groups such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF to expand the distribution of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 — nOPV2 —, which received WHO’s emergency use listing in 2020 and ended an outbreak in Tajikistan last year. The vaccine can help prevent the spread of polio variants that have emerged in under-immunized communities in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
The Gates Foundation, one of the world’s wealthiest philanthropies, is among the top global health funders. Late last year it pledged $1.2 billion to support efforts to eradicate wild poliovirus in Pakistan and Afghanistan — the last two endemic countries. It also said it wants to fund efforts to help prevent the spread of new vaccine-derived variants of poliovirus, which is different from the naturally occurring wild polio and can infect an immunized person through environmental contamination, such as fecal matter.