Millions more children from the world's poorest countries are being vaccinated against more diseases than ever before. This is a good thing and has been made possible by unprecedented cooperation between governments, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies.
We have been making a major contribution to broadening access to vaccines for decades. Since the early 1990's, under our tiered pricing policy, we ask countries to pay different prices based on their differing income levels rather than a single flat rate. At the same time, we have comprehensive vaccine research programmes in critical areas that affect poorer countries such as malaria, TB, HIV and Ebola.
Around 80% of all of GSK's vaccines, including our pneumococcal vaccine, were provided to developing countries last year (including least developed, low and middle income countries) at a substantial discount to western prices.
We offer our lowest prices to Gavi and UNICEF, which purchase vaccines for the world's poorest children. These prices can be as little as 10% of developed world prices. We also continue to look at other opportunities to support vaccination in developing countries. In January 2015 for example we committed to a ten-year price freeze for countries that graduate from Gavi support due to increased economic wealth to help ensure that children can continue to be vaccinated.
Many of our available vaccines are advanced and complex and require significant upfront capital investment to make and supply. Our pneumococcal vaccine is one of the most complex we've ever manufactured, essentially combining 10 vaccines in one. We will provide 720 million doses of pneumococcal vaccine for Gavi-eligible countries over the next 10 years at a deeply discounted price. At this level, we are able to just cover our costs. To discount it further would threaten our ability to supply it to these countries in the long-term. Nevertheless, we continue to look at ways to reduce production costs and any savings we make we would pass on to Gavi.