By Binish Rashid
New malaria vaccine delivered for the first time
The Central African Republic is the first country to receive thousands of doses of a new malaria vaccine first recommended by the World Health Organization last October. A total of 43,000 doses arrived by air today from UNICEF, and another 120,000 are scheduled to show up in the coming days.
The vaccine — called R21/Matrix-M — will be used as part of children’s routine immunization.
It comes as welcome news in a country plagued by one of the highest incidences of malaria worldwide; more than 1.7 million cases were reported in 2022. “Previous concerns about supply meeting demand are firmly behind us,” said Leila Pakkala, director of UNICEF Supply Division, in a statement. “Now our priority is for the vaccines to reach every child at risk.”
As a malaria researcher," says WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, "I used to dream of the day when we would have a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. Now we have two."
They're the first vaccines designed to work against a human parasite.
The first, called RTS,S, was unveiled more than two-and-a-half years ago. R21/Matrix-M is intended for children between 5 and 36 months, who are among the most vulnerable to the disease.
"A vaccine recruits the human immune system to fight the parasite as soon as it enters the body," says Dyann Wirth, chair of the WHO Malaria Policy Advisory Group. "A vaccinated person is poised to fight off the infection at its earliest stage."
WHO hopes that the combination of these vaccines will make a real difference, especially in Africa where malaria's toll is especially savage.
For example, in Burkina Faso in West Africa, pretty much everyone gets malaria. Last year, out of a population of 20-some million, about half got sick. Halidou Tinto was one of them. He leads the Clinical Research Unit of Nanaro in the country. His six-year-old twins also fell ill with malaria this year.
"As soon as [the children] are febrile or they complain about headache," Tinto says, "you have to think about malaria and treat them immediately. And you can avoid any bad outcome of the disease."