$1.9 billion pledged in fight against polio. But huge gap remains after cuts from donor countries.

By Lauren Kent, CNN

(CNN) — International leaders and philanthropists, including Bill Gates, announced $1.9 billion Monday in funding to advance polio eradication, but a large funding gap remains after high-income countries’ reductions in foreign aid.

The funding gap for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative through 2029 now stands at $440 million, according to a statement on the initiative about the pledging event held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The private-public partnership aims to eradicate polio worldwide by 2029 and is led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Gavi, the vaccine alliance. In October, the initiative announced it would experience a 30% budget reduction next year amid sharp declines in official development assistance from high-income countries.

“The gap that remains is largely due to tighter aid environments among traditional donors,” Ally Rogers, a spokesperson for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, told CNN. “Without the full $6.9 billion needed to fully implement the GPEI’s strategy, and sustained political commitment to a polio-free world, children will be left unprotected against polio, and the eradication effort could be hindered.”

Donor countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have also reduced funding for 2026, according to the initiative spokesperson and analysts. Meanwhile, the Trump administration halted funding for Gavi and pulled out of the WHO earlier this year. Funding to fight polio has continued to receive bipartisan support from Congress, and the fiscal year 2025 funding was level, but the budget for 2026 is not yet clear.

The $1.9 billion in donations will advance efforts to vaccinate 370 million children against polio each year and bolster local health systems that also protect kids from other preventable diseases.

“We are on the cusp of eradicating polio and securing a historic win for humanity. But we need all countries, partners and donors to step up now to get the job done,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement on Monday.

Initiative donors include the Mohamed bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity, Rotary International and Bloomberg Philanthropies, as well as the governments of Pakistan, Germany, the US, Japan and Luxembourg. The largest pledge of $1.2 billion was made by the Gates Foundation.

‘We’re 99.9% of the way there’

Poliovirus can cause infection in the central nervous system, which may lead to paralysis and death if breathing muscles become immobilized. The virus can spread rapidly in areas with poor sanitation. It used to paralyze more than 350,000 children around the world each year before global immunization efforts were launched, according to the WHO.

Now, wild poliovirus is only endemic, or consistently present, in two countries — Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, outbreaks of variant poliovirus continue to threaten 18 other countries, according to the statement from the Abu Dhabi summit.

Since the initiative was created in 1988, it estimates that billions of children have been protected through vaccination and that polio cases have been reduced by more than 99%.

“The fight to end polio shows what is possible when the world invests together in a shared goal. We’re 99.9 percent of the way there — but the last stretch demands the same determination that got us this far,” Gates, chair of the Gates Foundation and co-founder of Microsoft, said in a statement.

Global health officials are aiming to replicate the success of eradicating smallpox, which in 1980 became the first disease to be eliminated through human efforts. But several self-imposed deadlines for polio eradication have been missed starting with 2000, as the campaign has been plagued by funding gaps, the emergence of new polio variants, misinformation and mismanagement.

“It’s a few years more than we hoped for, but now we’ve got the resources to take the time to drive the new approaches we’re taking and bring it to a final end,” Gates added in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Becky Anderson.

“We have to keep vaccinating the kids,” he told CNN at the event in Abu Dhabi. “Nothing has saved as many lives as vaccines.”

Asked about the broader US reduction to global development aid this year, Gates noted that some funding has been restored after initial sweeping cuts and the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development.

“The trend line as the year has gone on is to get some restoration. As we speak today, it’s not clear whether we’ll end up with the 10% cut — which we can handle and drive new efficiency and innovation and be okay — or a 40% cut,” Gates said. He also noted that the US remains the largest aid giver for global health in absolute terms. “I’m certainly spending a lot of my time making the case that, you know, the US can afford to continue to be generous, and our values haven’t changed.”

“Sadly, the fact that we have more children dying I think is a wake-up call for some of the people in the administration that we need a pretty full restoration,” Gates added.

CNN’s Alireza Hajihosseini contributed to this report.

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