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It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Half of the world's children have received life-saving vaccines from measles to Ebola since Gavi,

the Vaccine Alliance, was created 25 years ago. The U.S. is now threatening to cut more than

$1 billion promised to the nonprofit organization. Today, Dr. Seth Berkeley, Gavi's former CEO,

tell Stephanie Desmond what the consequences to health

could be, not just in the world's poorest countries, but in the U.S. as well. Let's listen.

Seth Berkeley, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So today I want to talk

about the latest threats to global health, and that is the threat

to pull funding from the United States to something called Gavi, the vaccine initiative.

And I'd like to just start if you could tell us what Gavi is and what your affiliation was.

So Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is an amazing effort.

And what it was is it started about 25 years ago.

And the idea was to bring together all the key players in immunization and to try to have

them work together, which is hard to do.

But once you get everybody's consensus, it's a good thing, to try to bring new and underused vaccines to the world's children.

And the way it was decided who would get Gavi's aid was the poorest countries in the world.

So an economic threshold was set that has adjusted with inflation. It's

$1,800 now. If you're below that as a country, you're eligible for Gavi support. And if you're not,

...