The result is that an estimated 400,000 children die each year of Hib infection. Despite the low cost of the vaccine, poor countries have not purchased it. The children's vaccination program hopes to deliver these two new vaccines to all poor countries in the next five years. To receive the money, countries must submit detailed plans for distributing the vaccines as well as agree to pay for them after the five-year period. While public health specialists uniformly praise the initiative, most doubt that it alone can dramatically improve routine immunization coverage over the long term.
Bandwagons can stop as well as go.
Jeffrey Sachs, an international economist at Harvard University and chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization, said that Gates's huge donation was seed money. What Gates has done is fantastic. But Gates by himself can't carry the world on this.