Measles & Rubella Partnership

A coalition founded in 2001 as the Measles Initiative and renamed the Measles & Rubella Partnership in 2012, bringing together the American Red Cross, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF and the World Health Organization, later joined by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It supports national vaccination campaigns in high-burden countries, concentrated in Africa and South Asia, and expanded from a measles-only focus to include rubella and congenital rubella syndrome elimination. The partnership helped support vaccination of more than a billion children and cut estimated global measles deaths by more than 80 percent between 2000 and the mid-2010s, though coverage gaps and disruptions since have allowed measles deaths and large outbreaks to rise again in a number of countries.