An article in the online Telegraph today about Cameron pledging even more money that we haven’t got to international aid, in this case a vaccination program, raises a question or two about just how much the organisation of the vaccination actually costs.

Before I get to that, remember this article from the past week about international drug companies agreeing to lower their prices for poor countries :

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, said yesterday that Serum Institute of India and Panacea Biotec had agreed to reduce the prices of their pentavalent vaccine, which protects against five fatal diseases. And GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to sell a vaccine against diarrhoeal disease in the poorest countries for £1.50 a dose, a twentieth of its £30 price in developed countries.

At £1.50 a dose you would imagine that a few billion pounds of funding would go a very long way indeed. Not that far though when you look at the finer details of aforementioned Telegraph article :

Gavi’s aim of raising £2.3 billion over the next five years will help protect at least a quarter of a billion children against killer diseases and save four million lives, said Mr Cameron.

And he asked: “In this world, where countries are tackling deficits, and more than ever before the emphasis is quite rightly on getting value for money, what greater value for money can there possibly be?”

According to my simple maths that’s a cost of around £10 per child.

Now I could possibly understand the prices there if they were administering multiple vaccines at a time but there seem to be multi-target vaccines being used here at very similar prices to Glaxo’s own offering:

“We always wanted to bring down the prices from USD 3-3.5, as our price of USD 1.75 enables children from lots of countries access to the pentavalent vaccine,” Cyrus S Poonawalla, CMD Serum Institute of India told PTI.

Pentavalent there meaning it covers the five most common childhood diseases.

That leaves the question then of just who takes around 85% of the funding not spent on the vaccines themselves. Could it possibly be that some of our already government funded charities are taking the biggest slice of the pie in this exercise?

Finally, I have to wonder yet again just what Cameron is up to being so loose with our money.

The GAVI program wants to raise £2.3 billion of funding over the next five years and the UK appears to be funding over half that with the addition of today’s new money :

Britain’s existing commitment is £680 million for 2011-15

…

“Britain will play its full part,” Mr Cameron told the conference.

“In addition to our existing support for Gavi, we will provide £814 million of new funding up to 2015.

Are we being ridiculously profligate with money we are having to borrow or have all the rest of the worlds countries seen sense and cut their aid programs to save themselves?

Unfortunately, I think both apply.