Job openings at the Campaign....click here for details

UTW 11th Edition has arrived 

Higher prices for newer ARVs and paediatric medicines still inadequate

UNITAID gives Green Light on Patent Pool

Read more

 

MSF to host malnutrition symposium in NY Read more

Development Today: Donors want more facts before finalising 1.5b USD deal for vaccine industry

24th April 2008

A decision to commit USD 1.5 billion for the Advance Market Commitment, a subsidy package that aims to stimulate production of vaccines for poor countries, is just weeks away. Yet the six donors, including Norway, are still waiting for key facts about how the subsidy will work. MSF has asked for background information about AMC to be put in the public domain to allow for informed debate. This has been promised, but has not yet materialised.

A month from today, a donor group that includes Italy, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, Russia and the Gates Foundation will meet to finalise an aid deal worth USD 1.5 billion for the Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a project to stimulate production of a vaccine for strains of pneumoccocal disease prevalent in developing countries.

The medical relief organisation Médecins Sans Frontières has asked for background data about AMC to be put into the public domain to allow for critical discussion. But the vaccine alliance GAVI, which administers AMC, appears to be dragging its feet. Both the donors and GAVI say they want full transparency. But it is partly because of the nature of the AMC model that full disclosure of relevant information is proving difficult.

The AMC is an innovative financing model that has not been tried before. It amounts to a subsidy to pharmaceutical companies for the development and production of new vaccines. The subsidy is meant to reduce the risk of investing in products for poor country markets, and is only paid when a vaccine meeting certain specifications is available at a given price set by the donors.

SENSITIVE INFORMATION
According to the logic of the model, it will only work if the price is right. Finding the “right" price depends on a realistic estimate of companies’ development and production costs and expected profit margins.
It is this information that is so sensitive.

Last year the AMC donors established an Economic Expert Group, chaired by David Flemming, to work out the specifics of the AMC model. Based on extensive number crunching, the group came up with recommendations on how the model should function.

At a GAVI briefing on AMC for civil society organisations earlier this month, Tido von Schoenangerer, Director of the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines at Médecins Sans Frontières, requested the baseline data on which the Economic Expert Group based its assumptions. He argued that this is needed to enable informed public discussion of the AMC concept.

TIGHT SCHEDULE
In an email to Development Today April 10, von Schoenangerer writes: “It is very important that the models that were used by the expert committee will be in the public domain as quickly as possible, certainly before the set up of the AMC has been completed. At the moment we are told by GAVI that it will take 2-3 weeks until the models can be made available." (See Opinion Page Eleven)
This does not leave much time. The donors are scheduled to meet on May 20 to take their final decision about the AMC. When DT went to print, MSF had still not received the information. According to GAVI, the information should be ready by early May.

Donors want it to be made available to MSF. They want to see it themselves.
According to Ine Måreng at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the donors wanted to make sure that the underlying analysis and in-formation would be made public in order to ensure transparency.

Måreng says that this request was put forward when setting the mandate of the Expert Group. “The request was first made when we established the [group] last year," she says to DT. “GAVI and David Flemming were clear about that requirement from the donors."
Based on interviews with donors and GAVI, however, it becomes evident that all actors involved in the AMC face a dilemma with regard to what can be made public.

The AMC expert group has engaged in consultations with pharmaceutical companies based on the experts’ own cost estimates. Industry has agreed to these consultations on the condition that their input is kept confidential. Obviously, once such a deal is made, it must be respected. Donors note that it is especially important that industry feels it can trust the donors since other AMCs (for diseases like TB and malaria) are in the pipeline, and would, like this one, rely on cooperation with industry.