Malaria kills about 500,000 people each year, about half of them children in Africa. The new vaccine will help turn the tide, experts said. World Health Organization’s director general hails ‘historic day’ in fight against parasitic disease
The World Health Organization has recommended the widespread rollout of the first malaria vaccine, in a move experts hope could save tens of thousands of children’s lives each year across Africa.
Hailing “an historic day”, the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that after a successful pilot programme in three African countries the RTS,S vaccine should be made available more widely.
The vaccine, which went through lengthy clinical trials, has limited efficacy, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years of trials.
“Using this vaccine in addition to existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year,” said Tedros on Wednesday. “It is safe. It significantly reduces life-threatening, severe malaria, and we estimate it to be highly cost-effective.”
He added: “Malaria has been with us for millennia, and the dream of a malaria vaccine has been a long-held, but unattainable dream. Today, the RTS,S malaria vaccine, more than 30 years in the making, changes the course of public health history. We still have a very long road to travel. But this is a long stride down that road.”
“I started my career as a malaria researcher, and I longed for the day that we would have an effective vaccine against this ancient and terrible disease. And today is that day, an historic day. Today, the WHO is recommending the broad use of the world’s first malaria vaccine,” Tedros said at a press conference in Geneva.
The RTS,S vaccine, also known as Mosquirix, was developed by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and has been administered to more than 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi since the pilot programme began in 2019.
Earlier this year, scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University said a vaccine they had developed had shown results that would make it the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy. Over 12 months the vaccine showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries.
Malaria trial shows ‘striking’ 70% reduction in severe illness in children
Gareth Jenkins, director of advocacy at the charity Malaria No More, said the announcement was “a truly historic moment” and “another critical step in building our armoury of weapons” against malaria.
Noting the role played by GSK in the development of the RTS,S vaccine, he called on the UK government to continue to invest in cutting-edge research that could “finally bring about a zero-malaria world”.
“This complex, but preventable and treatable disease, causes hundreds of millions of infections each year, risking lives and livelihoods, trapping people in poverty in some of the poorest countries in Africa, and creating ‘disease blind spots’ which threaten our own health security at home. If we save lives from malaria today, we can also protect ourselves against the diseases of tomorrow,” he said.
