Rotary and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation extending fundraising partnership to eradicate polio – 18 October 2022
Rotary and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are renewing their longstanding partnership to end polio, announcing a joint commitment of up to $450 million to support the global polio eradication effort.
“We’ve made tremendous progress, but the world is facing multiple pandemics, and vaccine hesitancy is on the rise. Recent polio outbreaks in Malawi and Mozambique, plus detection of poliovirus in Israel, the UK, and the United States prove that if polio exists anywhere, it threatens children everywhere,” said Ian Riseley, chair of the Rotary Foundation and Past President of Rotary International. “Partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helps us ensure that children in polio-affected countries get the lifesaving vaccines they need to be protected from polio for life.”
This pledge comes on the heels of Rotary’s announcement at the Global Citizen Festival pledging an additional US$150 million towards polio eradication.
Rotary is committed to raising $50 million per year over the next three years, with every dollar to be matched with two additional dollars from the Gates Foundation. This expanded agreement will translate into up to a total of $450 million to support the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
“Eradicating polio requires the dedication and generosity of nations and individuals around the world, and Rotarians are again leading the way,” said Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Rotary International and Rotarians continue to be the heart of GPEI – and have been since the beginning. Together, we are moving closer to our shared goal of ending polio and ensuring that families will never have to fear this disease again.”
“As the first organization to envision a polio-free world, Rotary is more committed than ever to delivering on our promise that one day, no child will ever again be paralyzed by polio,” said Rotary President Jennifer Jones. “Our partnership with the Gates Foundation helps us eliminate any impediment to conquer polio now."
The Rotary Foundation Board of Trustees recently approved a $50 million grant for AFRO surveillance, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Outbreak Response. These grants will support ongoing immunization activities to reach children under the age of five with an emphasis on improving community awareness and engagement—promoting vaccine acceptance, reducing the number of missed children—and ensuring robust surveillance capacity to quickly detect poliovirus transmission.
Polio—a paralyzing and sometimes deadly disease—is on the verge of becoming the second human disease in history to be eradicated. This critical funding helps ensure that children in at-risk countries are protected from polio, and that the wild poliovirus is eliminated in the last two countries that continue to report cases.
While only Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to report cases of wild poliovirus, the remaining challenges to global eradication—like difficulty reaching children amid insecurity and conflict and weak health systems—have proven to be the most difficult. To meet these challenges head-on and ensure the continuation of program efforts, funding and support from donors and world governments are imperative.
Rotary has contributed more than $2.6 billion to fight polio, including matching funds from the Gates Foundation, and countless volunteer hours since launching its polio eradication program, PolioPlus, in 1985. In 1988, Rotary joined in partnership with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to form the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance later joined. When the initiative launched, there were 350,000 cases of polio every year. Today the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.9 percent.
Anyone can be a part of the fight to end polio and have their donation to Rotary matched 2-to-1 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Visit endpolio.org to learn more and donate.
Re-emergence of polio underscores the need for eradication – 21 September 2022
The detection of poliovirus, and even cases of polio, in places where it hasn’t been found for years has demonstrated once again that eradicating a human disease isn’t easy, especially in the final stages.
In recent months, an unvaccinated man in the United States was paralyzed. In the UK, poliovirus was detected in sewage. In Malawi, a child contracted polio. And Mozambique announced its first polio outbreak in 30 years.
But rather than be discouraged, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) remain confident that they are making progress and can achieve their goal of a polio-free world. There are several reasons for this optimism.
A new oral vaccine, which has a substantially lower risk of causing vaccine-derived variant polio, is now available. This makes it less likely that the weakened strain of poliovirus that is used in the vaccine will mutate and spur outbreaks in communities where immunization levels are low, which has occurred in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Moreover, the number of cases of the disease caused by the wild virus has been at historically low levels in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the two countries where poliovirus transmission has never been stopped. This presents an opportunity to seize the moment and stop the wild virus forever.
Rotary’s perseverance has played an enormous role in bringing the world to this point. It’s that commitment, coupled with the determination of the other GPEI partners, that is needed to complete the job.
“This year has shown us why we must stay the course on polio eradication,” said Mike McGovern, chair of Rotary’s PolioPlus Committee. “We have an opportunity to make history and need Rotarians to redouble their commitment by raising funds and awareness.”
Rotary members have been at the center of the worldwide effort to eradicate polio for more than three decades. Rotary launched PolioPlus in 1985 and helped found the GPEI in 1988, with the goal of eradicating a human disease for only the second time in history. (The World Health Organization declared the world free of smallpox in 1980.) When the GPEI was founded, wild poliovirus paralyzed hundreds of children every day, with an estimated 350,000 polio cases across more than 125 countries in one year. Since then, cases have plummeted more than 99.9%, sparing more than 20 million people from paralysis.
Through a funding partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary commits US$150 million to fighting polio every year. Rotary members have contributed more than US$2.6 billion and countless volunteer hours to this effort. With the GPEI partners, members engage with communities everywhere to encourage high vaccination rates and help immunize more than 400 million children annually.
As the world gets closer to having zero polio cases that are caused by the wild virus, public health experts say it is more important to track all forms of the virus, wherever they may appear, including in polio-free regions.
They also say that the re-emergence of polio in these places highlights the importance of vaccination as the only form of protection against polio and many other diseases. It draws attention to the work needed to encourage people to get vaccinated at a time when vaccination rates are dropping in some communities. And it reinforces the fact that polio anywhere is a threat everywhere, which underscores the importance of the End Polio Now campaign.
As World Polio Day on 24 October approaches, Rotary urges its members to tell their communities about the importance of vaccination. Global donors and national governments are also expected to announce new pledges to fund the GPEI’s 2022-26 polio eradication strategy. This strategy focuses on greater accountability from national governments about their work to eradicate wild polio and end outbreaks of polio caused by variant poliovirus.
With these kinds of sustained political and financial commitments, the world is still on the path toward an incredible accomplishment: making sure no person is paralyzed by polio ever again.
Rotary statement on recent polio detections in U.S., Europe – 18 August 2022
The U.S. is still considered low risk for paralytic outbreaks of polio due to the high level of vaccine coverage across the population. If a child has received the entire course of vaccines, the risk of becoming paralyzed by polio is negligible. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 92.6% of children aged 24 months are fully vaccinated against polio, slightly below the 95% World Health Organization target.
The best things countries can do to protect themselves from polio until the disease is eradicated from the world are to: maintain high vaccination coverage and robust disease surveillance and be ready to respond in the event of an outbreak to minimize the risk and consequences of polio re-introduction or re-emergence anywhere.
The world currently has a unique opportunity to stop virus transmission for good. Still, all parties, including donors and country governments, must re-commit to polio eradication by fully supporting the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) 2022-2026 strategy. This focuses on adopting an emergency posture while generating greater accountability and ownership from country governments to eradicate wild polio and end variant poliovirus (cVDPV) outbreaks.
Rotary, a global service organization with over 1.4 million members, has been at the center of the worldwide effort to eradicate polio for over three decades. Every year, through our funding partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary commits $150 million to the global effort to eradicate polio. We have contributed more than $2.6 billion and countless volunteer hours to end polio forever. Together with our partners, we engage communities everywhere to encourage high vaccination rates, immunizing over 400 million children annually. More than 20 million people are walking today who otherwise would have been paralyzed because of our efforts and those of our partners in the GPEI.
The time for urgent action is now. A new vaccine has been deployed – novel oral polio vaccine 2 (nOPV2) – which is more genetically stable to stop outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus effectively. With sustained political and financial commitments, the GPEI is confident that we can achieve a world in which no child is paralyzed by polio again.