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News/Event Item
First Annual Beth Waters Memorial Lecture: Vaccines for the World's Poorest People
April 17, 2008
 On April 16, the Global Health Council hosted more than 90 of the world's most prominent experts in vaccine development and delivery at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. for the first annual Beth Waters Memorial Lecture. This lecture series was established in honor of Beth Waters, a communications professional who was a lifetime advocate for universal vaccination. Len Lavenda a colleague and personal friend of Beth Waters and Vice President of Communications for sanofi pasteur, introduced the series.
The featured speaker was Dr. Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, Director of the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. Dr. Okwo-Bele spoke about how vaccines have the capacity to prevent 25 percent of child deaths by 2015, ranking them among the most cost-effective and important prevention tools in the spectrum of interventions. He addressed strategies and challenges to ensuring vaccines reach the world’s poorest people – those often lying beyond the reach of health systems. Highlighting successes in disease eradication and in the integration of interventions, he emphasized the need to learn from the past and apply successful models to future delivery challenges that arise as new vaccines enter the market. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of country-level engagement and capacity-building, while also advocating for international financing mechanisms to assist middle-income countries supply vaccines, similar to the ones in existence for low-income countries. Dr. Okwo-Bele also underlined the need for improved surveillance and for satisfactory program management and operations research to ensure efficient use of limited resources for vaccination programs. With 66 million children and pregnant mothers still in need of vaccines, Dr. Okwo-Bele concluded by stressing the need for global consensus on immunization policy and challenging the community to achieve our vaccine agenda.
Following Dr. Okwo-Bele’s remarks, experts in the audience participated initiated questions on the future opportunities and challenges in vaccine delivery and engaged in discussion led by Dr. Nils Daulaire, president and CEO of the Global Health Council. A white paper on the lecture and discussion will be issued by the Council in the near future.
Beth Waters was a communications professional committed to advancing the cause of vaccine development and delivery. Among her many achievements, she helped to create a model for improving access to HIV treatment that has been applied to scale up treatment for other diseases.
To learn more about Beth, please click here.
category: Global Health Council News : Advocacy Events
contributed by Liza Nanni on 7 April 2008
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