A campaign to get life-saving vaccines to millions of children in poor countries received a $1 billion cash boost from Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and the government of Norway on Tuesday.

The grant was made on the eve of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where access to healthcare is set to be high on the agenda. The donors hope it will kickstart other, similar pledges.

More than 2 million people in poor countries die each year because they have not received immunisations that are taken for granted in the industrialised world.

To help close the gap, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it was giving $750 million over 10 years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), while Norway promised $290 million over 5 years.

The cash takes funds raised by the non-profit group since 1999 to $2.3 billion - an impressive amount but still not enough to ensure universal coverage.

With an estimated 27 million children in the developing world going without basic immunisation each year, the World Health Organisation estimates $8-12 billion is needed.

Gates said the funding gap could be met if governments adopted innovative aid and development strategies.

“I feel very good that, over the next 10 years, government contributions to GAVI will be a substantial percentage - 75-80 percent - of the total funds,” he told reporters in a conference call.

He highlighted as particularly promising a plan by British finance minister Gordon Brown for an International Finance Facility, which would seek to double aid by leveraging existing budgets in the capital markets.

$1,000 PER LIFE

Gates, who will discuss funding for healthcare with Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, during a panel debate later this week in Davos, said the case for investing in childhood vaccines was indisputable.

“We are basically saving lives for less than $1,000 per life here,” he said.

GAVI will use the new funds to improve immunisation services needed to deliver basic vaccines, such as those against diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, polio and TB.

It also aims to introduce underused vaccines where needed, including shots against hepatitis B, and to accelerate development of new ones.

Vaccine research is often viewed as a low priority by pharmaceutical companies, especially when the target market is the developing world.

But recently there have been a number of advances that could protect many more children in Africa, Asia and Latin America against a range of additional diseases. These include new vaccines for rotavirus, meningitis and pneumococcus and, further off, the prospect of the world’s first vaccine against malaria.

Providing an international funding pool that can afford to distribute these new vaccines when they are available will be vital, according to Gates.

“The capabilities of the large pharmaceutical companies and the small biotech companies are absolutely something we need to tap into and we have got to make things work for them,” he said.

“Knowing they can make those investments is part of what is going to make this system work.”