 This coming Monday, June 13th, donors, foundations, advocates will be gathering in London for the first pledging conference for the GAVI Alliance, which is the alliance that delivers vaccines and immunizations for the world's poorest populations. This is a very important moment. The organization has put out an appeal for $3.7 billion in assistance for the next period 2011 through 2015. They're hoping to be able to add that to existing resources of $3.1 billion and be able to bring forward vaccines for an additional 250 million poor children around the world. Despite the poor economic circumstances and the budgetary stress that governments are under and donors and partner countries, there's quite a bit of optimism that in fact they will achieve success. And if they do, this will carry GAVI into a new era. The GAVI secretariat will have a new president and CEO as of August 1, has a new board chairman and is looking to really put the world's focus on this critical dimension of global health, which is that vaccines are vaccines particularly for poor populations, especially for the young, are a specially effective and cost effective way of improving the health of the world's poor and reducing mortality and illness. In the future, looking beyond the pledging conference in London on Monday, it's going to be very, very important to take the long view and for the GAVI Alliance and its backers to be able to build substantial resources into the long term from multiple directions. There needs to be higher level efforts at engaging the emerging powers to begin to participate as backers of this initiative and there's much more that can be done in terms of getting partner recipient governments to engage in higher levels of co-financing and there's more that can be done in engaging industry and shaping markets so that price levels can be brought down without damaging the market so that you can get better bang for the buck in the dollars that are secured.