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- Twelve African countries will receive 18 million doses of the first-ever malaria vaccine.
- An additional nine African countries will start receiving the vaccine from late this year into 2024.
- Africa is home to 95% of malaria cases and 96% of deaths.
Twelve African countries will receive 18 million doses of RTS,S/AS01 - the first-ever malaria vaccine - over the next two years, according to United Nations bodies.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef) said the rollout represented a major step forward in the fight against one of the leading causes of death on the continent.
According to WHO estimates, there were about 619 000 malaria deaths in 2021 in Africa, home to 95% of malaria cases and 96% of deaths.
The RTS,S/AS01 vaccine was first administered in a pilot phase in 2019 in Malawi, Ghana and Kenya.
About 1.7 million children were vaccinated in what results showed to be "safe and effective, resulting in a substantial reduction in severe malaria and a fall in child deaths".
In a joint statement the WHO and Unicef said "at least 28 African countries have expressed interest in receiving the malaria vaccine".
For now, however, the 12 countries that will get the vaccine are Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone and Uganda, the UN bodies said.
"The first doses of the vaccine are expected to arrive in countries during the last quarter of 2023, with countries starting to roll them out by early 2024," the statement read.
According to the framework on vaccine supply, the global immunisation community has faced challenges of an initially limited supply of other vaccines and the lessons learnt could be drawn upon to manage the limited supply of the malaria vaccine.
The managing director of Country Programmes Delivery at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Thabani Maphosa, said the vaccine would be impactful if distributed fairly.
"This vaccine has the potential to be very impactful in the fight against malaria, and when broadly deployed alongside other interventions, it can prevent tens of thousands of future deaths every year," he said.
This he added, was possible through lessons learnt during the pilot phases in Malawi, Ghana and Kenya.
"While we work with manufacturers to help ramp up supply, we need to make sure the doses that we do have are used as effectively as possible, which means applying all the learnings from our pilot programmes as we broaden out to a new total of 12 countries," he added.
Decades of research and development that brought together private-public partnerships and the science and local communities in Africa, produced what they called a groundbreaking vaccine.
The News24 Africa Desk is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation. The stories produced through the Africa Desk and the opinions and statements that may be contained herein do not reflect those of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
