What does GAVI stand for? 

GAVI

GAVI, officially Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (previously the GAVI Alliance, and before that the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) is a public–private global health partnership with the goal of increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.GAVI brings together developing country and donor governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry in both industrialised and developing countries, research and technical agencies, civil society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private philanthropists. GAVI has observer status at the World Health Assembly. GAVI has been praised for being innovative, effective, and less bureaucratic than multilateral government institutions like the WHO. GAVI programmes can often produce quantified, politically-appealing, easy-to-explain results within an election cycle, which is appealing to parties locked in an election cycle.It currently supports the immunization of almost half the world’s children, giving it power to negotiate better prices for the world’s poorest countries and remove the commercial risks that manufacturers faced in serving this market. It also provides funding to strengthen health systems and train health workers across the developing world. To date Gavi has helped immunize over 760 million children, preventing over 13 million deaths worldwide, helping increase DTP3 vaccine coverage in supported countries from 59% in 2000 to 81% in 2019, contributing to a halving in child mortality. GAVI has been criticized for giving private donors more unilateral power to decide on global health goals, prioritizing new, expensive vaccines while putting less money and effort into expanding coverage of old, cheap ones, harming local healthcare systems, spending too much on subsidies to large, profitable pharmaceutical companies without reducing the prices of some vaccines, and its conflicts of interest in having vaccine manufacturers on its governance board. GAVI has taken steps to address some of these concerns.GAVI's approach to public health has been described as business-oriented and technology-focused, using market-oriented measures, and seeking quantifiable results. This model, termed the "Gates approach" or US-type approach, GAVI is taken to exemplify. It contrasts with the approach typified by the Alma Ata Declaration, which focusses on the effects of political, social, and cultural systems on health.

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