LONDON — The World Health Organization on Wednesday endorsed the world's first malaria vaccine and said it should be given to children across Africa in the hope that it will spur stalled efforts to curb the spread of the parasitic disease.
WHO said its decision was based largely on results from ongoing research in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that tracked more than 800,000 children who have received the vaccine since 2019. “This is a huge step forward,” said Julian Rayner, director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, who was not part of the WHO decision. “It’s an imperfect vaccine, but it will still stop hundreds of thousands of children from dying.”
Dr. Alejandro Cravioto, head of the WHO vaccine group that made the recommendation, said designing a shot against malaria was particularly difficult because it is a parasitic disease spread by mosquitoes.“We’re confronted with extraordinarily complex organisms,” he said. “We are not yet in reach of a highly efficacious vaccine, but what we have now is a vaccine that can be deployed and that is safe.
“In some countries where it gets really hot, children just sleep outside, so they can’t be protected by a bed net,” Clarke said. “So obviously if they’ve been vaccinated, they will still be protected.”“If we’re going to decrease the disease burden now, we need something else,” she explained.