On October 14, Timothy Nielander, representative from Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunizations (GAVI), spoke to the Upper School about the needs for vaccinations in third-world countries during an assembly created by the Global Empowerment and Outreach (GEO) club.

Nielander presented various video clips and spoke about the crisis in many developing nations. He remains hopeful that GAVI will aid the 19 million children without immunizations against basic diseases around the world.

GAVI works to not only provide vaccinations, but also to make them affordable, some even as inexpensive as two to three dollars a piece. A major disease that they work to immunize against is pneumonia, the world’s leading child killing disease.

Every year, 1.7 million children die from diseases that could have been prevented by vaccines, 98% of these children are from third world countries.

GAVI has a set process for vaccinations: a country first requests assistance, their request is then reviewed to check for biases, and finally, if approved, the country begins receiving vaccinations for its population.

The aid can come in one of four ways: accelerating the vaccine usage, strengthening the health system, increasing predictability, and shaping the vaccination market. The target recipients for these vaccinations are young children, as well as mothers.

Many students, such as Agata Sorotokin (9), believed that the presentation helped reveal the dangers of diseases that those in first-world countries may not be aware of.

“[It was] very informative and helped the students find out what’s going on in the world and [stressed] the importance of having organizations like GAVI to help child mortality go down,” she said.

Nihal Uppugunduri (10) agreed with Agata and thought that some of the facts that he brought up were interesting.

“[I was] surprised by the statistics brought up […] For example that a child dies of pneumonia every 20 seconds,” he said.

However, other students disagreed, remarking that the speaker may have retracted from the message.

“The concept was inspirational but the speaker was kind of dull,” Leon Chin (9) said.

To raise funds for GAVI, GEO is running several activities during the week of October 17, such as the vow of silence. In this activity, students will pledge to remain quiet for a certain amount of time, with their friends and family sponsoring them to do so.