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Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, is to make the largest ever single charitable donation with a pledge of $10 billion (£6 billion) for vaccine work over the next decade.

Mr Gates said that he hoped the coming ten years would be the “decade of the vaccine” to reduce dramatically child mortality in the world’s poorest
countries. It is calculated that his pledge could save more than 8 million
lives.

Announcing the commitment, which far outstrips even the enormous previous donations by his own foundation, Mr Gates called for increased investment by
governments and the private sector to help to research, develop and deliver
vaccines.

“We must make this the decade of vaccines,” Mr Gates said. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will
make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

Mr Gates and his wife, Melinda, made their announcement at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland, where they were joined by
Julian Lob-Levyt, the head of the vaccine consortium, the GAVI Alliance.

“Vaccines are a miracle. With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime,” Mrs Gates said. “We’ve made vaccines our No 1
priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their
incredible impact on children’s lives.”

Among the infections to be targeted with the money are rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhoea, and pneumococcal disease, which causes pneumonia, blood
poisoning, and a form of meningitis.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has used a model developed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, to project the
potential impact of vaccines on childhood deaths over the next decade.

By significantly scaling up the delivery of life-saving vaccines in developing countries to 90 per cent coverage — including the new vaccines to prevent
severe diarrhoea and pneumonia — the model suggests that the deaths of 7.6
million children under the age of 5 could be prevented between now and 2019.

It also estimates that an additional 1.1 million children could be saved with the rapid introduction of a malaria vaccine beginning in 2014.

Mr Gates said that if additional vaccines such as for tuberculosis were developed and introduced in this decade even more lives could be saved.

The new funding is in addition to the $4.5 billion that the Gates Foundation has already committed to vaccine research, development and delivery over the
past ten years.

A large portion of the money is expected to go to the GAVI Alliance — which was launched at the World Economic Forum ten years ago this week. To date
GAVI, which focuses on public private partnerships, has reached 257 million
additional children with new and underused vaccines and prevented 5 million
deaths.

Mr Lob-Levyt, the organisation’s chief executive, said that, in the coming years, GAVI would focus on rapidly introducing vaccines to tackle diarrhoea
and pneumonia.

Two studies published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that vaccines against rotavirus, which can kill babies and young children
within days by causing severe diarrhoea, could save 2 million children over
the next decade.

The research suggested that vaccinating babies against rotavirus significantly cut deaths from diarrhoea — by 61 percent in Africa and by 35 percent in
Mexico.

Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea, which kills more than 500,000 children under the age of 5 every year, nearly half of them in
Africa. Rotavirus vaccines are now given as part of the standard
immunisations in many developed countries, although it has yet to be
introduced in Britain.

There are around 130,000 episodes of gastroenteritis caused by rotavirus each year in the UK. Around 12,700 children are hospitalised and four die each
year.

Speakers at the press conference at Davos today underscored the need for major new funding from donors, governments and the private sector to rapidly scale
immunisation programmes, conduct more laboratory research and clinical
trials, and ensure a steady market for vaccines in developing countries and
an adequate supply from manufacturers.

Commenting on Mr Gates’s announcement, Margaret Chan, the World Health Organisation’s director-general said: “The Gates Foundation’s commitment to
vaccines is unprecedented, but just a small part of what is needed. It’s
absolutely crucial that both governments and the private sector step up
efforts to provide life-saving vaccines to children who need them most.”