Remarks by Raymond V. Gilmartin
Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute Awards
The Pierre Hotel, New York
Wednesday, May 31, 2000
It is a privilege to accept this award - and I do so on behalf of all of us at Merck. We remain very much committed to the ideals of Albert Sabin and those upon which the Sabin Institute was founded: to advance and realize the enormous potential of vaccines to prevent deadly disease.
In that spirit this evening, we are pleased to reaffirm our support for the Pan American Health Organization and its goal to eradicate measles in this hemisphere by 2001. Working with PAHO, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Honduran government, Merck will donate more than 600,000 additional doses of our vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, bringing the total number donated to one million.
For nearly three decades, the MMR-II vaccine has safeguarded our children, and we're proud that the previous donation allowed the Ministry of Health to reduce the number of children at risk for measles by over 30 percent. Of course, the deep commitment and extraordinary dedication of the First Lady of Honduras, Mary Flake de Flores, has been instrumental to the success of this collaborative effort. How fitting that we pay her tribute tonight.
I think all of us here recognize that preventive and primary health care - particularly immunizations - can have a tremendous impact on economic, social, and human development. At Merck, our vision of health for the hemisphere - and indeed for the world - is one in which the finest achievements of science can benefit humanity.
Scientists at our company and around the world push the boundaries of science and technology to make medicines available. Our next challenge is to make them accessible. Medical breakthroughs have created medicines and vaccines for many life-threatening diseases. Many therapies are off-patent and inexpensive. Yet millions still suffer from illnesses that are preventable or treatable.
For the future, we're confident in continuing medical breakthroughs. At Merck, our major barrier in research is science itself: we don't keep discoveries on the shelf simply because the market may be limited. But for the present, we must have the courage to tackle the barriers we face in the delivery of existing treatments and vaccines.
Those barriers include not just health care infrastructure but also the political will and sustainable financing required to bring care and treatment to those in need. We have confidence that this is possible - confidence based on our experience with the donation of our medicine for river blindness. This therapy requires one pill taken just once a year.
Yet it took the collaborative efforts of the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Carter Center, international aid agencies, non-governmental development organizations, national ministries of health, community health care workers - and Merck - several years to develop an infrastructure and a delivery system for the medicine. Now in its second decade, the program reaches about 25 million people a year, and it has also helped to improve primary health care in some of the poorest regions of Africa.
Our experience taught us that even the simplest pharmaceutical intervention faces tremendous challenges in delivery - and that collaborations are necessary to address this great need.
We are delighted to be working with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization - which includes the WHO, the World Bank, foundations, the health care industry, and local and international organizations, with a major donation from the Gates Foundation. While several companies, including ours, are donating vaccines - for GAVI to be successful, we must recognize that the availability of safe and effective vaccines is only one step along the road to access. It takes political will - a commitment to make immunization a national priority - and an adequate medical infrastructure to make genuine progress on that road.
Honduras, for example, is among the poorest nations in our hemisphere. It is a nation ravaged recently by natural disaster. Yet this country - with the leadership and collaboration of many, including our next honoree, has undertaken a national immunization program that stands as a model to the world - a model of political commitment - a model of vision, compassion, and dedication.
The coming months and years hold enormous promise in the history of medicine - the publishing of the human genome - major progress against cancer, diabetes, depression, and other major diseases - the potential for treatments and even a vaccine for HIV/AIDS.
Yet the years ahead also hold promise for advances more basic. These may not make the front pages, but they are every bit as important in the annals of human health. That is to provide the basics of healthy living for children and families the world over - especially immunizations against such diseases as measles, mumps, and rubella, Hepatitis B, and Haemophilus influenzae type b.
Broad-based collaborations will be necessary to make such groundbreaking progress. I look forward to working with all those here, to help improve access to better health care and medicines for people throughout the world.
In that spirit - the spirit of Dr. Albert B. Sabin - allow me to conclude with a remark he made during a visit by American scientists to scientists in the former Soviet Union in the 1950s - a time not noted for cooperation between these nations.
He said: "A toast to biological warfare - against all disease."
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