He just returned from a trip to Rwanda, the first of those 72 nations to opt into the program. With the cooperation of Rwandan health minister Richard Sezibera, the GAVI Alliance and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, on April 25 a medical team immunized the first two dozen children in a rural village an hour outside the capital city of Kigali.
"This is fundamentally about kids and parents, not immunology and statistics," he told me. "It's about rectifying a fundamental injustice that, by virtue of global roulette, affects children because of where they're born."
For Dr. Levine, the reality was brought home with the story of an African mother, Tiemany Diarra, who had to watch helplessly as her younger daughter died of pneumococcal pneumonia in the same hospital where her elder daughter had earlier died the same way. The two girls, he recognized, were roughly the ages of his own daughters.
Eleven other countries have been approved for the pneumococcal immunization program, a number Dr. Levine expects will expand to 20 by year's end. As more nations come on board, the long-term goal is to prevent 5 million to 8 million child deaths by 2030.
So far donors have committed $1.5 billion to purchase an estimated 200 million vaccine doses. This commitment overcomes a major hurdle of signaling to any pharmaceutical companies interested in producing the vaccine that there will be a sufficient demand to warrant new infrastructure and staffing investments to manufacture the doses. But with an eventual demand of 200 million doses per year, more funding is urgently required.
Finding the money is always difficult, but it doesn't help when Norway, a country with a population and gross domestic product one-fiftieth of the United States', has committed more money ($75 million) than we have ($72 million).
For President Obama - whose foreign policy philosophy de-emphasizes "democracy promotion" in favor of "dignity promotion" via human rights safeguards, economic development and disease eradication - this is a chance to put the money where his mouth is.
"There will always be funding challenges, and the U.S. government must step up," said Levine.
Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at UMBC. His column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is schaller67@gmail.com.
