Global Action Plan for Influenza Vaccines (GAP)

Global Action Plan for Influenza Vaccines (GAP) is a comprehensive strategy to reduce the present global shortage of influenza vaccines for seasonal epidemics and pandemic influenza in all countries of the world through three major approaches:
- Increase in seasonal vaccine use
- Increase in vaccine production capacity
- Research and development

GAP was launched in 2006 and further refined in 2011.

• More about GAP

The first GAP approach is to encourage countries to increase their seasonal vaccine use.
Increased use of seasonal influenza vaccine will reduce disease burden of seasonal influenza infections, contribute towards the preparedness of countries to respond to an eventual pandemic and motivate industry to develop greater capacity for manufacturing vaccines.

• More about Objective 1 and key achievements

The second GAP approach concentrates on increasing production capacity for pandemic vaccines without expectation for a commensurate increase in the demand for seasonal vaccine.
Short term – produce enough vaccine to immunize two billion people; this vaccine should be available on the market six months after transfer of the vaccine prototype strain to industry.
Medium and long term – produce enough vaccine to immunize the world’s population (6.7 billion).

• More about Objective 2 and key achievements
• Country success stories

The third GAP approach encourages to use new technologies to develop more potent and effective influenza vaccines that are:
(a) capable of inducing protective responses after one dose, and/or
(b) induce broad-spectrum and long-lasting immunity against both seasonal and pandemic influenza strains.

• More about Objective 3 and key achievements