Ethical Performance | News | GSK and Pfizer agree drugs deal for poor

GSK and Pfizer agree drugs deal for poor

Posted: 30-03-2010

A deal between the world’s two largest pharmaceuticals companies is to provide 600 million doses of pneumonia vaccines at a 90 per cent discount for the 74 poorest countries in the world.

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will deliver the drugs for pneumococcal disease, one of the biggest killers of infants in the third world, over the next decade at about ten per cent of the price paid by the world’s richest countries.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), which brokered the deal, aims to ensure that children in the poorest nations will receive the vaccine within a year of it becoming available to the richest, and it is hoped that the vaccines in the latest move, known as Prevenar for Pfizer and Synflorix for GSK, will help fight a disease that kills around 1.6 million people each year.

Julian Lob-Levyt, chief executive of GAVI, said the ‘landmark deal’ had been four years in the making, but means that ‘this year we can begin to roll out a better pneumococcal vaccine that can tackle one of the biggest killers of children in the poorest parts of the world’.

Jean Stephenne, head of the GSK vaccines division, said: ‘We believe that the richest countries should pay the highest prices.’

GAVI says its next target is a vaccine for diarrhoea, another big killer in the third world.

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