IRIN: Africa’s meningitis A vaccine: how partnership replaced ‘Big Pharma’
“…[I]n response to the appeal from African governments, the WHO and PATH set up the Meningitis Vaccine Project with the objective of getting a vaccine approved and into production. With $70 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to oil the wheels, they began by approaching the big pharmaceutical companies. … They describe what they did as setting up a kind of virtual pharmaceutical company…” (Blunt, 11/17).