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A health worker prepares to give a child a malaria shot during an official ceremony to mark the launch of a malaria vaccination campaign in Côte d’Ivoire.
CNN
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Children in Ivory Coast received their first doses of a relatively cheap new malaria vaccine on Monday, in a move hailed as a major milestone in the fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases.
The R21 vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and the Serum Institute of India (SII), has been sent to several African countries and is due to be administered in South Sudan on Tuesday, Oxford University said in a statement to CNN.
The vaccine costs less than $4 per dose, “making it realistic to distribute tens of millions of doses in the future”, and is highly effective in young children – around 75% to 80% – Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, who led the vaccine’s development, said in an interview with BBC Radio on Monday.
According to World Health Organization (WHO) modelling, widespread introduction of the R21 vaccine and its cousin, the RTS,S vaccine, could prevent up to 500,000 child deaths each year.
Malaria, which is spread by some types of mosquitoes, is preventable and treatable, but it will still kill about 608,000 people worldwide in 2022, according to the WHO. About 95% of these deaths will occur in Africa, with children under the age of five accounting for about 80% of malaria deaths across the continent.
According to a statement from Oxford University, SIII has already produced more than 25 million doses of the vaccine and has committed to producing up to 100 million doses per year, a scale that would make the vaccine affordable.
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Vaccination campaigns aim to significantly reduce the number of deaths from malaria.
The university said it had enough supply of the vaccine to start with injecting it into 250,000 children under the age of two in Côte d’Ivoire, and that the vaccine has also been approved for use in Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic.
R21 will be used in combination with the RTS,S vaccine, which has already been given to more than two million children during a four-year trial programme in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi and has reduced overall mortality by 13 per cent, according to UNICEF.
These two vaccines have been approved by the WHO and are expected to have a very significant positive impact on public health, alongside other prevention strategies such as bed nets.
Hill added, “There’s still a lot of work to be done to prepare people across the country, especially as we aim to distribute millions of doses of vaccine starting this year.”
“It’s a three-dose vaccine, usually given at five, six and seven months of age, followed by a booster dose a year later. This is not the time other vaccines are usually given, so training is needed in these countries, which are primarily lower-income countries.”
