The Guardian on Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines

Salil Tripathi, writing in the Guardian on Friday

The moral dilemma has become acute because many think something is unseemly about a company raking in large profits when millions of people, many in agony, and many more poor, need the medicine to ward off disease and survive. ...The way around that dilemma could be pre-commitment to purchase. Advance commitments to purchase may create the incentives that inventors need to pursue active research. Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics this year, wrote about the value of precommitment.The idea has been fleshed out by Harvard's Michael Kremer and by economists at the Centre for Global Development in Washington.Kremer's research has shown that even at $40 per immunised person, vaccines against malaria and HIV would be cost-effective in poor countries. But because private firms don't expect to receive even a tenth of that amount in the form of revenue from those countries, they have no incentive to develop vaccines.