Brown to meet Pope on trip to launch vaccination scheme

from The Guardian

Gordon Brown will have an audience with Pope Benedict XVI today during a trip to Rome to launch a vaccination scheme for children in the developing world.

The chancellor will also hold talks with the Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, in what will be seen by observers as a further indication of his status as "prime minister-in-waiting" before Tony Blair's expected departure this summer.

Britain has joined forces with Italy, Canada and Norway to create a £750m fund to encourage drug companies to develop vaccines for pneumococcal disease, which kills 1.6 million people - including one million children under five - each year.

It is hoped that the Advance Market Commitment fund will speed provision of protection against the illness to 100 million children and save five million lives by 2030.

The AMC is a new financial mechanism which works by providing a ready market for drugs which are desperately needed in poorer countries and by giving these nations the purchasing power to obtain discounted prices for the medicines when they become available.

At present, private-sector pharmaceutical research is heavily tilted towards conditions predominantly affecting the rich world, where companies are guaranteed a lucrative market for any effective treatment.

As a result, just 10% of £50bn-plus invested globally each year in health research is devoted to diseases responsible for 90% of the world's health problems.

Only 16 of the 1,400 new medicines developed between 1975 and 1999 were for these neglected diseases.

By establishing a credible market in the poorest countries, an AMC creates incentives for private-sector investment in vaccines tailored to the needs of those countries.

A vaccine for pneumococcal disease has been chosen as the target for the first AMC, because the condition is the leading cause of child pneumonia deaths, as well as the second leading cause of childhood meningitis deaths.

Pneumonia claims the lives of 1.9 million children each year, almost 20% of all child deaths.

It is intended that future AMCs will provide funding for developing countries to acquire vaccines against malaria and other fatal diseases.

Mr Brown will speak at the launch of the AMC at the Italian government's finance ministry in Rome, also attended by Queen Rania of Jordan, Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, and ministers from Italy, Canada, Norway and Ghana.

The promoters of the initiative will also be received in a private audience by the Pope, and Mr Brown will later hold talks with Mr Prodi at his official residence, the Palazzo Chiggi.

The meeting with the Pope comes shortly after the government clashed with the Roman Catholic church over plans to require all adoption agencies to handle requests for help from gay couples.

The row - which ended with the offer of a transitional period for Catholic agencies - is thought to have strained the loyalties of Labour's traditional working-class Catholic vote, particularly in parts of Scotland.