Pfizer to supply vaccines under Gates' initiative

PFIZER’S BIOTECHNOLOGY manufacturing facility at Grange Castle in Co Dublin is to supply almost 500 million vaccines to developing countries under an initiative part-funded by the Bill and Melanie Gates Foundation.

Pfizer, which announced a €145 million investment in its Grange Castle site in September, will make its Prevenar 13 vaccine available at a 90 per cent discount to developing countries, most of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Grange Castle site is the only one in the world which assembles the Prevenar 13 vaccine.

Based on a price of $7 (€5.25) for the first 20 per cent of the vaccines and $3.50 (€2.62) for all the rest, it amounts to a €1.5 billion order for the biotechnology plant over the next 11 years until 2023.

The vaccine, which was unveiled last year, treats 13 different strains of the deadly Pneumococcal disease which is the leading vaccine-preventable killer of young children worldwide, accounting for between 800,000 and a million deaths each year worldwide, 90 per cent of whom are in developing countries.

The initiative has been funded with a $1 billion (€750 million) donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was announced in June to fund immunisation programmes in the developing world.

The money has gone towards the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), which was set up as part of the Millennium goals in 2000.

A total of $4.3 billion (€3.2 billion) was pledged in June to Gavi by the Gates’ foundation and the five donor countries involved: the UK, Canada, Russia, Norway and Italy through a process known as the Pneumococcal Advance Market Commitment.

It is planned to manufacture 480 million vaccines through Gavi in that timeframe at the Grange Castle facility.

Two big pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), have agreed to participate in the scheme and produce the vaccines at a substantial discount.

They have also agreed to introduce it into the developing world just a year after it was unveiled in the developed world.

Usually the time-lag can be as long as a decade.