Now, a malaria vaccine

As the Covid-19 vaccines compete with new variants and sometimes fierce political resistance around the world, researchers in Africa have been testing another breakthrough vaccine, for malaria. The parasite that causes malaria has been with us for tens of thousands of years and remains endemic in nearly 100 countries near the equator in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Transmitted from person to person by a single type of mosquito, the disease is estimated to have killed billions over the course of human history—and continues to kill nearly half a million people every year, most of them children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa. The new vaccine, approved by the World Health Organization in October, is the first successfully devised not only for malaria but for any parasitic disease. Known as Mosquirix, the vaccine has only demonstrated about 50 percent effectiveness in large trials, and children have to get it when they’re five months old, with three booster shots over the following three years—a tough proposition in the relatively remote, poor areas where malaria is most common. Given these complications, what difference will the new drug make?

Pascaline Dupas is a professor of International Studies and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. Dupas says the vaccine could mean a major turning point in the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Beyond saving lives, significantly reducing malaria, as the vaccine has the potential to do, will lead to improved human and economic development. Combined with existing insecticide-treated bed nets, malaria treatments, and efforts to control mosquitos, Mosquirix could even spur a movement to eradicate the disease for good. To Dupas, the only thing now lacking for an adequate distribution of the vaccine—and the attendant push to wipe out malaria altogether—is money …

Michael Bluhm: How important is this new medicine?

Pascaline Dupas: It’s super-important, because malaria is a huge problem. It’s long been one of the most pressing issues of our time. I’ve been very frustrated that it’s felt as though people have given up on eradicating malaria. I never quite understood why, because it kills so many kids, and it makes people unproductive. Imagine getting the flu over and over and over again—as a child, it’s a deadly thing.