At today's briefing of Permanent Representations in Geneva I talked about the huge economic benefits of vaccines in preparation for the Global Vaccine Summit on June 4 for @Gavi replenishment which UK is hosting. Thread (1/n)

The @IMFNews estimate the world economy will lose $9trillion to C-19 over 2 years. It is a good investment to spend money now to shape markets and accelerate a C-19 vaccine. Accelerating a C-19 vaccine by just 1 month would be worth $375bn to the world, $100-150bn to the US (2/n)

Most vaccines fail so we must invest in multiple candidates. The chart below uses historic data on failure rates at different stages and correlation of risk across vaccines that use the same approach to estimate the probability of success by number of vaccine candidates. (3/n)

The huge economic losses we are sustaining suggests we need to go big and go early. Investing now so we can vaccinate at scale as soon as regulatory approval is achieved will cost billions, but it will save trillions. See http://www.acceleratinght.org  for more detail (4/n)

Many worry (as I do) about how a vaccine will be allocated but the more we expand supply of vaccine the less tension there is about allocation. @gavi, @CEPIvaccines and others are working to reduce supply bottlenecks. How we write contracts with firms will help too. (5/n)

But as we worry about C19 remember we already have vaccines for many devastating infectious diseases. Routine immunization is one of the most cost-effective health interventions we know of. Under @Gavi's leadership the number and coverage of vaccines has risen dramatically. (6/n)

In 1980 the picture looked very different with just 21% of 1 year olds covered by the polio vaccine for example. (7/n)

This rise in the number and coverage of vaccines contributed to sharp fall in child mortality, which has in been associated with more investment in education and declines in fertility rates as families are able to cherish and put more investment into fewer children. (8/n)

But these gains are threatened by C-19 as immunization rates have plummeted around the world. For example, data from @IRDGlobal suggests there has been a 65% fall in immunization visits in Sindh in Pakistan as a result of C-19. (9/n)

But there is reason to hope. Following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a lot of investment alongside innovative approaches helped bring immunisation rates back up. We now just have to do this at a global scale. (10/n) https://www.poverty-action.org/study/social-incentives-childhood-immunization-sierra-leone

This chart shows benefits of @gavi & shaping markets. Impressively Gavi achieved same coverage for rotavirus vaccine in the poorest countries as rest of the world. But it did this 5 yrs earlier for pneumococcus by getting firms to build more capacity. end
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20201017