The World Health Organization and Unicef are to distribute 18m doses of GSK’s new RTS/S malaria vaccine to 12 countries, including nine that haven’t received it before, in efforts to further reduce the malaria burden among African children, reports CIDRAP.
Malaria is still one of Africa’s deadliest diseases, with 500 000 children under five dying from the mosquito-borne parasite in 2021.
GSK’s RTS/S vaccine has been in the making for more than 30 years, launching in Malawi in 2019 as part of a pilot programme that currently includes Ghana and Kenya.
At a WHO media briefing Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that with changing weather patterns amid the climate crisis, “mosquitoes that carry these diseases are increasing in density and spreading further afield”.
He added that 1.6m doses of the vaccine had been given in the three pilot countries, resulting in a “substantial reduction in severe malaria and a fall in child deaths”.
The WHO prequalified the vaccine in July 2022 and also launched a framework for allocating supplies, which with input from countries, experts, and other health partners, took into account countries at highest risk and how interested nations in the region are incorporating RTS/S into their routine childhood immunisations.
High interest from African countries
Last week, the WHO and Unicef said at least 28 African countries have expressed interest and that health officials were heartened by the region’s high interest in receiving the shot.
Of 18m available doses available for the next three years, global health officials allocated doses for the pilot programmes under way in Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya, while the nine countries that will receive their first shipments include Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.
Dr Thabani Maphosa, managing director of country programme delivery at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said that while manufacturers ramp up supply, the goal is to ensure the doses are used as efficiently as possible while applying lessons learned from the pilot programmes.
Growing demand, next steps
The WHO estimates that annual demand for the vaccine will be at 40m to 60m by 2026 and will grow to 80m to 100 000m a year by 2030.
GSK is producing the vaccine and India’s Bharat Biotech will supply doses in the future, said the agency, adding that a second malaria vaccine is expected to enter the market, and it may soon quality the R21/Matrix-M vaccine, developed by Oxford University and made by the Serum Institute of India.
In April, Ghana became the first country to approve the R21/Matrix-M vaccine.
CIDRAP article – Nine more African countries to receive malaria vaccine for children (Open access)
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