PETITION: Stem the cost of life-saving drugs

Two pharmaceutical giants have raked in over $28 billion in sales for the pneumonia vaccine alone, yet say they can’t afford to drop the price to $5 so that all children in developing countries can be protected against the worst of childhood killers. The companies keep snubbing us, so now we need your help to tell them that children’s lives should be put before corporate profits. SIGN OUR PETITION AND SHARE WIDELY.

Dear friends/supporters,

We need your help to get two pharmaceutical giants to reduce the price of a life-saving vaccine that currently remains priced out of reach for millions of children in developing countries.

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are the only two producers of the life-saving pneumonia vaccine. Many lives have been saved by this vaccine, but pneumonia still kills nearly 1 million children every year.

In fact, 75% of children around the world remain unprotected against pneumonia, the leading infectious cause of childhood death worldwide.

You can help us change this – SIGN THE PETITION.

Only about half of the world’s countries have been able to start using the pneumonia vaccine produced by Pfizer & GSK, known as the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV). One major barrier is the high price.

Even at the lowest global prices, it costs 68 times more today to vaccinate a child in developing countries than it did in 2001 – nearly half of that increase is due to the high price of the pneumonia vaccine alone. This means that a growing number of developing countries can’t afford to buy the vaccine to protect their children against this childhood killer.

Pfizer & GSK have collectively reported more than US$26 billion in global sales from this vaccine. That’s almost three times the entire 20-year budget that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, uses to provide 10 different vaccines in around 60 of the world’s poorest countries.

MSF has also struggled to get long-term affordable access to the pneumonia vaccine to help vaccinate some of the world’s most vulnerable children in humanitarian crises.

It’s time for Pfizer and GSK to lower the price of the pneumonia vaccine to $5 per child for all developing countries and humanitarian organisations – SIGN THE PETITION.

The lowest global price for the pneumonia vaccine today is $10 per child, available to only the poorest countries through Gavi. History has shown that with competition, prices will inevitably come down. A producer in India is developing a pneumonia vaccine that it has promised to sell for $6 per child – but it won’t be available until at least 2019. Between now and then, as many as 4 million more children could die because they have not been vaccinated against pneumonia. A more affordable pneumonia vaccine could help reduce this unnecessary loss of life, so why wait any longer to lower the price?

We need children’s lives to be prioritized over more blockbuster revenues. Today, children are being left unprotected in countries such as Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Romania, Syria and Thailand, among many others. A child dies of pneumonia every 35 seconds. Now’s the time to lower the price of the pneumonia vaccine to $5 per child for all developing countries and for humanitarian organisations, so more lives can be saved – SIGN THE PETITION.

Together we can do this.

Thanks for all your support,

Vivian, Francois, Kate, Barbara, Kelly and the whole A FAIR SHOT team