Behind the scenes at the Vaccine Summit

As I mentioned in an earlier post, last week I attended the first-ever Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi. In the months leading up to the conference, we weren’t at all sure how successful it would be. Budgets are tight. How much would governments and donors be willing to contribute?

In the video above, I talk about how things turned out.

I want to especially thank these seven private donors, who came together at the Summit to contribute $335 million to help eradicate polio.

• His Royal Highness Alwaleed Bin Talal (Alwaleed Foundation)
• Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg Foundation)
• Ray Dalio (Dalio Family Foundation)
• Carl C. Icahn (Foundation for a Greater Opportunity)
• Carlos Slim (Fundación Carlos Slim Helú)
• Dato Tahir (Tahir Foundation)
• Albert L. Ueltschi Foundation

With these and other commitments, including $1.8 billion from the Gates Foundation, we raised $4 billion, which is enough to vaccinate more than 1 billion children against polio and other diseases over the next five years. That’s phenomenal—it’s more than 70 percent of the funding we’ll need for the plan we rolled out at the Summit to free the world of polio by 2018. Now we need to finish the job by raising that final 30 percent.  When we eradicate polio—and I’m confident that we will—it will be a critical milestone in the Decade of Vaccines, a vision to reach all children with the vaccines they need by 2020.