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One month left to fund life-saving vaccines

On 13 June there’s a very important summit happening in London.

While regular readers of the Save the Children campaign and policy blogs will be aware of it, most people in the UK aren’t. But it has the potential to change the life prospects for millions of children.

Four hours to save four million lives

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (GAVI) is holding this London summit for representatives of rich donor countries, philanthropists and NGOs.

They’ll be deciding whether or not to fund the alliance’s plans over the next five years; plans that, if implemented in full, could save 4 million lives.

The business bit of the meeting is only about four hours long. In that short time, representatives of rich countries could choose life for millions of children.

Vaccines are incredibly effective at saving lives. Once a child is vaccinated they can be protected for life from killer illnesses such as diarrhoea and measles — mass child-killers that can effectively be swatted away with a series of quick jabs.

Filling the funding gap

Since January this year more than 17,000 campaigners have emailed David Cameron asking him to go to the GAVI summit and lead efforts to fully fund their work.

In February we reported back to you that David Cameron would be opening the summit and that we seemed to be making progress on the UK upping their commitment.

On top of all this, colleagues here and elsewhere in the sector have been lobbying hard to ensure that the UK works with other rich countries to make sure we fill the funding gap that GAVI faces.

We’ve got one month left

There’s one month to build up the public pressure on David Cameron and other world leaders to make sure that they don’t squander this opportunity. Acting now can make the difference. The more people that join in, the more people that demand action of our governments, the more likely it is that world leaders will have to listen.

So don’t just sign this petition on your own — send it to your friends, send it to your family, send it to your colleagues and ask them to sign it too.

Let’s see if, by the time we get to 13 June, we can get 30,000 people supporting the campaign for no child to die of vaccine-preventable diseases.

Three quick things to do:

1) Sign the petition

2) Email your contacts and tell them why you’ve signed up

3) Share the action on facebook and twitter with the helpful ‘share’ buttons on the action page.

Hopefully you’ll want to keep in touch with how the campaign is progressing — stay in touch by watching our blogs and keeping an eye on the emails that we’ll drop you when we’ve got news.

Thousands have already joined us but time is running out before the global vaccines conference. Be the next to add your voice.

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