Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines: Not too Late for U.S. Leadership

Proponents of the Advance Market Commitment (AMC) were pleased to see the Washington Post editorial supporting U.S. involvement earlier this week. It is not too late for the U.S. to be a major force in making AMCs work. A U.S. financial commitment would ensure continuing analytic and policy engagement with an initiative shaped by optimism about the potential to make markets work for people. There is much to be done to ensure this pilot for a pneumococcal vaccine works, and to put that learning to work for a comparable initiative for malaria and other killer diseases. The ideas and the policy work behind this initiative, after all, came originally and primarily from the U.S. research and policy community over many years. I am personally pleased by the role that CGD has played in translating the concept of a market guarantee for a future vaccine into implementation, first worked out in detail by Michael Kremer (before he joined CGD as a non-resident fellow). In doing this, we collaborated with Michael in building on many earlier efforts to refine the idea and bring it to the attention of the policy community -- see for example a Financial Times Op-ed by Michael with CGD Honorary Board member Jeffrey Sachs in 1999.