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A health worker prepares to give a child a malaria shot during the official ceremony marking the start of a malaria vaccination campaign in Ivory Coast.
CNN
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Children in Ivory Coast received the first doses of a new, relatively cheap malaria vaccine on Monday, a move seen as a major milestone in the fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases.
The R21 vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and the Serum Institute of India (SII), has been sent to several African countries and will also be administered in South Sudan on Tuesday, the University of Oxford said in a statement to CNN.
The vaccine costs less than $4 per dose, making it “realistic to roll it out in tens of millions of doses from now on”, and it has a high efficacy of around 75%-80% in young children, Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, who led the development of the vaccine, said in an interview with BBC Radio on Monday.
According to World Health Organization (WHO) modelling, up to 500,000 child deaths could be saved each year by widespread introduction of the R21 vaccine, alongside the RTS,S vaccine.
Malaria is spread by some types of mosquitoes and is preventable and curable, but it still killed about 608,000 people worldwide in 2022, according to the WHO. About 95% of those deaths occurred in Africa, where children under 5 are responsible responsible for about 80% of all malaria deaths on the continent.
According to the statement from Oxford University, SIII has already produced more than 25 million doses and has committed to producing up to 100 million doses per year. This scale ensures that the vaccine remains affordable.
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The vaccination campaign aims to drastically reduce the number of deaths from malaria.
There are enough doses to initially vaccinate 250,000 children under the age of 2 in Ivory Coast, while Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic have all also approved the vaccine, the university said.
R21 will be used in combination with the RTS,S vaccine, which has already been administered to more than 2 million children in a four-year pilot programme in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. According to UNICEF, the vaccine has reduced overall mortality by 13%.
Both vaccines have been approved by the WHO and are expected to have a huge positive impact on public health, when combined with other prevention strategies such as bed nets.
Hill added that there is still “a lot of work for people in the country to set up, especially if you plan to distribute millions of doses this year.”
“This is a three-dose vaccine, typically given at five, six, seven months of age and a booster a year later. That’s not a time when other vaccines are typically given, so there’s a need for training in these relatively low-income countries.”