1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

There’s already some encouraging bipartisan agreement on increasing U.S. funding for Gavi, a vital global alliance providing vaccines against deadly diseases to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Now, I'm asking you to make sure that Congress funds Gavi even more, because we have a historic opportunity right now to speed up the rollout of vital new malaria vaccines across Africa! In 2024, the Biden Administration pledged a five-year commitment of at least $1.58 billion in U.S. support for Gavi (formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation). Even better, it looks like there’s actually some bipartisan support in Congress to fund that pledge (and maybe even increase it!) in the next federal budget. Gavi is a critical global coalition of major health organizations from the World Bank to UNICEF, dedicated to manufacturing and deploying vaccines against deadly diseases to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people. The new U.S. pledge is really important, really good news: by number of human lives saved per dollar, funding Gavi is probably the single most important and effective thing the United States government is doing right now, saving millions of lives for relatively small amounts of money. But there’s amazing potential to go even further. Right now, at this moment in history, any additional funding for Gavi will have a disproportionately huge impact, as brilliant new inventions have just opened up a whole new front against one of the world’s worst diseases. With extra funding, Gavi could help speed up the global rollout of malaria vaccines, one of the most important yet underreported changes happening the world right now. Malaria is one of the deadliest enemies of the human species. We’ve been fighting malaria for generations, and heroically eradicated it in much of the world, but the mosquito-borne parasite is still hanging on in sub-Saharan Africa. Getting malaria vaccines to where they’re needed is a gigantic win for human well-being (and should happen as soon as possible!). With the malaria vaccines beginning to roll out in 2024, humanity is starting an epic project to spare the poorest and most vulnerable people of Earth from debilitating illness by the millions and save children’s lives by the tens of thousands, using our ingenuity to defeat one of our species’ most ancient enemies. Not to mention, we’re defeating one of the biggest threats posed by climate change (a potential resurgence of malaria) before it has a chance to really get going. This is spectacular news. Now, you can make it happen even faster, and save tens of thousands of lives. Please do your utmost and fund Gavi as much as possible to speed up the rollout of malaria vaccines! Thank you very much for your time and your work.