2023-10-02 16:44:51
The World Health Organization (WHO) gave the green light on Monday to a second “safe and effective” vaccine for children against malaria, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.
“As a malaria researcher, I dreamed of the day when we would have a safe and effective malaria vaccine. Now we have two,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared at a press conference.
WHO “recommends a second vaccine called R21/Matrix-M to prevent malaria in children at risk of contracting the disease”, following advice from its Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) and its Panel Malaria Management Policy Advisory (MPAG).
This very old disease, which causes fever, headaches and chills to become a serious, even fatal condition, in the absence of treatment, caused the death of 619,000 people worldwide in 2021.
Other WHO experts are still evaluating manufacturing modalities and other regulatory aspects, explained the director of the immunization and vaccines department at WHO, Dr Kate O’Brien.
Once this final green light is obtained, Unicef and the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi) will be able to administer the vaccine, which is manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. However, its use has already been authorized by the authorities in Ghana, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
In 2021, another vaccine, “RTS,S”, produced by the British pharmaceutical giant GSK, had become the first vaccine to be recommended by the WHO to prevent malaria in children in areas where transmission of the disease is moderate to high.
The two vaccines have similar effectiveness rates of around 75% when administered under the same conditions.
“At a cost of between 2 and 4 US dollars (1.90 to 3.81 euros) per dose, this vaccine is comparable to other recommended methods against malaria and other vaccines for children,” said Doctor Tedros.
60 million doses per year
It therefore constitutes a “very big step forward” for the dozens of countries that want to obtain serums against this scourge, indicated Dr. O’Brien.
By 2026, WHO and its partners expect demands of up to 60 million doses per year. By 2030, this figure is expected to reach up to 100 million, Gavi said in a statement.
Pilot programs to introduce “RTS,S” in three African countries – Ghana, Kenya and Malawi – have enabled more than 1.7 million children to receive at least one dose of vaccine since 2019.
In July, the WHO, Gavi and UNICEF jointly announced that 18 million doses of this anti-malaria vaccine would be allocated to 12 African countries in 2023-2025.
Caused by a parasite transmitted by mosquitoes, malaria remains a formidable scourge, particularly for African children, due in particular to growing resistance to treatment.
The vast majority of cases and deaths occur in Africa.
“Since 2000, deaths from malaria have fallen by more than half and we have succeeded in eliminating malaria in many parts of the world,” but this progress is not enough, noted Dr Tedros.
New dengue vaccine
The malaria vaccine isn’t the only one the WHO SAGE group focused on at its meeting last week.
Experts also recommended a new dengue vaccine, Qdenga, for 6-16 year olds living in areas where the disease is a significant public health problem.
They also recommended a new meningitis vaccine, called Men5CV, which protects against five species of bacteria that cause the disease.
As for the fight against Covid-19, these experts judged that for most vaccines, a single dose was now sufficient for the primary vaccination against the disease given that most people have already been infected at least once .
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