The U.S. State Department has agreed to release money for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, after previously planning to stop funding it, according to CIDRAP. Gavi is an organization that collects money from wealthy countries and uses it to buy vaccines at lower prices for people in poor countries. The New York Times had reported on the Trump administration's plan to end U.S. support for Gavi entirely.

The reversal follows a tense review period. In mid-2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy said the U.S. would not give Gavi more money unless the organization changed how it evaluates vaccine science, according to KFF. That condition effectively froze U.S. contributions during a year when Gavi was already stretched thin by competing global health needs and growing pressure on donor governments.

The U.S. has historically been one of Gavi's biggest government donors. Past U.S. contributions helped fund COVAX, a program created to make sure COVID-19 vaccines reached the world's most vulnerable people, according to a USAID watchdog report.

The broader context here is a back-and-forth pattern in U.S. global health spending. The State Department's decision to release Gavi funding follows the administration's June 2026 announcement of more than $1 billion in humanitarian aid to UNICEF and the World Food Programme, as the U.S. Embassy in China detailed. Of that, $93 million went through UNICEF to transport and distribute ready-to-eat therapeutic food, according to the U.S. Embassy in Gaborone. The World Food Programme welcomed the contribution, saying it would help reach more than 38 million vulnerable people with food and nutrition.

These two efforts — vaccine funding through Gavi and food aid through UNICEF and WFP — serve the same people: low-income populations who need both food and vaccines to stay healthy. The U.S. decision to resume Gavi funding while also expanding food aid suggests the government is picking and choosing which international health programs to support, rather than pulling out of all of them or returning to all of them at once.

The conditions tied to the funding are worth paying attention to. Secretary Kennedy's demand that Gavi change its evaluation of vaccine science sets a new precedent: U.S. money for international health organizations may now depend on those organizations agreeing with the administration's scientific views. Gavi was designed to include donor governments, recipient countries, vaccine makers, and civil society groups in its decisions, so that no single donor could steer its choices. A funding condition based on scientific methodology pushes against that design.

Oversight issues are also part of the picture. Watchdog audits have previously found weaknesses in how USAID oversees its global health programs and recommended fixes, per the OIG's semi-annual report. Those findings focused on how programs were run, not on policy direction, but they will likely influence how Congress and oversight bodies track the Gavi funds once they are released.

For Gavi's partners and the countries that receive its vaccines, the reinstatement brings back a vital funding source after months of uncertainty. The phase-out had already begun, so vaccine purchasing schedules and planning in several countries had been disrupted. Agreeing to release the money does not automatically fix that disruption; how quickly things recover will depend on when the funds actually arrive and how much is released.

The path from a planned shutdown to a conditional restart shows that this policy is still evolving. Whether the funding return means a lasting commitment to Gavi or just a temporary break from further conditions is an open question — both for the donor community and for the countries that rely on Gavi's ability to buy vaccines at affordable prices.