Advanced Market Commitment for Pneumococcal Vaccines: Annual Report 2013-2014

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Abstract

The pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) for pneumococcal vaccines is now in its fourth year of implementation and significant progress has been made. During the 2013 – 2014 reporting period, the third Call for Supply Offers was successfully concluded. Two new supply agreements were signed, for periods of 11 years each (including dose provision in the AMC capacity development period), bringing the total number of supply agreements under the AMC programme to six. In addition to the annual supply commitment achieved under these new agreements, additional supply was also secured for delivery in the short term for 2013 to 2015. Noticeably, the first reduction in the tail price under AMC to below US $3.50/dose will likely contribute to a total savings of US $157 million over the lifetime of the agreements.

With the six supply agreements, the total contracted supply amount through 2024 now amounts to 1.46 billion doses. Out of the US $1.5 billion AMC funds, the two suppliers that have pre-qualified pneumococcal vaccines have been allocated US $1.095 billion of the funds. Twenty-seven percent of the AMC funds remain available.

On the demand side, the uptake of pneumococcal vaccines has been unprecedented. During this reporting period, sixteen additional AMC-eligible countries have introduced this vaccine, bringing the total number of introductions to date to 40. Fifteen other countries that have been approved for GAVI support are expected to introduce in the coming two years. Despite the remarkable performance in terms of the number of introductions, some delays in introductions have been registered as a result of a number of factors. These include global supply constraints, insufficient human resource capacity at the country level to manage competing priorities, delays in expanding cold chain capacity, political issues and organisational changes in countries, and delays in making funding available at national and/or subnational levels for pre-introduction activities. Drawing from lessons gathered from introductions to date, GAVI Alliance is strengthening the coordination mechanism among partners, identifying and addressing bottlenecks in funding disbursements, and deploying refined tools to assist countries in their pre-introduction activities.

Based on Strategic Demand Forecast (SDF) v8.0 which was approved after the 2013 procurement cycle, GAVI Secretariat, in consultation with UNICEF SD, decided to not issue a fourth Call for Supply Offers for the procurement of pneumococcal vaccines in 2014. The need for the next tender will be reassessed later in 2014 based on SDF v9.0 and the outcomes of the next rounds of New Vaccines Support applications to the GAVI Secretariat.