The World Health Organisation (WHO) approved the use of the first-ever malaria vaccine called Mosquirix on Wednesday.
The Director of its Global Malaria Program, Dr. Pedro Alonso, said, “To have a malaria vaccine that is safe, moderately effective and ready for distribution is a historic event”.
The decision to approve the vaccine that was first made by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in 1987 was taken after a review of a pilot program that was deployed since 2019 in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi where over two million of its doses were administered.
WHO studied the evidence from the pilot project and then decided to recommend “the broad use of the world’s first malaria vaccine”.
According to a statement issued by WHO, the vaccine is recommended for use among children in sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions with ‘moderate to high malaria transmission.
However, funding is an important step that will precede the dispatching of the vaccine for African children.
The Director of the WHO’s Department of Immunisation, Vaccines, and Biologicals, Kate O’Brien, said,
That will be the next major step … Then we will be set up for [the] scaling of doses and decisions about where the vaccine will be most useful and how it will be deployed.
