Africa will soon receive its share of world’s first malaria vaccine. The second largest continent’s twelve countries will receive 18 million doses within next two years, said the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday, along with other agencies.
As part of pilot programmes, doses of Mosquirix malaria vaccine have been administered to over 1.7 million children since 2019 in countries like Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, said a joint statement by the Global Vaccine Alliance GAVI, WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The joint statement by the agencies said, “At least 28 African countries have expressed interest in receiving the malaria vaccine.” According to the agencies, the vaccine has been proven to be “safe and effective.”
Sierra Leone, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Benin, Uganda, Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Liberia, are the nine African nations that will receive Mosquirix malaria vaccine in their first.
The Director of Immunization at WHO, Kate O’Brien, said “the high demand for the vaccine and the strong reach of childhood immunisation will increase equity in access to malaria prevention and save many young lives.”
The said nine countries will receive their first doses of the vaccine by the end of the year and will have them administered in the early quarter of 2024.
WHO has designated malaria as one of the deadliest diseases in Africa, saying it killed nearly half a million children under the age of five in 2021 alone. The continent accounted for about 95% of global malaria cases and 96% of malaria deaths in that year, the health agency added.
The WHO has informed that the vaccine for malaria developed by the British multinational pharmaceutical company GSK, RTS,S vaccine, is the maiden vaccine recommended by the agency to not let malaria spread in children in regions of moderate to high transmission of the disease.
