Governments and pharmaceutical companies prided themselves on the speed at which the Covid-19 vaccine was developed, put into production and distributed. The media has, however, been quiet on the failure of the new malaria vaccine to be given to people.
Last year the World Health Organization endorsed Mosquirix, the first-ever malaria vaccine that promised to reduce the incidences of a disease that kills a child every minute.
But due to lack of funding and commercial potential according to WHO officials, GSK staff, scientists and non-profit groups thwarting GSK is failing to produce as many doses as needed.
The British drug manufacturer is committed to producing up to 15 million doses every year through 2028 considerably less than the WHO says is needed.
It is currently unlikely to make more than a few million annually before 2026. GSK said that it could not make enough of its vaccine Mosquirix to meet the vast demand without more funds from international donors.
Long-term, WHO officials say roughly 100 million doses a year of the four-dose vaccine will be needed, which would cover around 25 million children. When the U.N. agency backed Mosquirix last October, it said that even a smaller supply could save 40,000 to 80,000 lives each year, without specifying the number of doses required.
The world's inability to fund more Mosquirix shots dismays many in Africa. Children on the continent account for the vast majority of the roughly 600,000 global malaria deaths every year.
"Mosquirix has the potential to save a lot of precious lives before another new vaccine arrives," said Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, a public health specialist leading a pilot vaccination program in Ghana. "The more we wait, the more children die needlessly."
Unlike many pharmaceutical products, there is no major market for a malaria vaccine in the developed world, where drug companies typically make the large profits that they say allows them to make their products available at far lower prices in poorer countries.
This is a disease of the poor, so it's not been that appealing in terms of the market," said Corine Karema, chief executive of the nonprofit RBM Partnership to End Malaria, which is working with governments in Africa to eliminate the disease. "But one kid dies of malaria every minute - that's unacceptable."
GSK's maximum target of 15 million doses could prevent up to about 20,000 deaths each year. Yet even hitting 15 million could take years, according to several officials at the WHO and elsewhere in the malaria effort who said wider distribution beyond the pilot countries was unlikely before early 2024, and even then it would start slowly.
Mary Hamel, the WHO's malaria vaccine implementation head, told Reuters that COVID vaccines had shown how quickly things could move with the political will and funding - which she said malaria had never had.
It is not clear how the shot's distribution will be financed long-term. Funding for malaria totaled $3.3 billion in 2020, less than half of the estimated need. Adding malaria vaccines could cost between $325 million and more than $600 million annually, depending on how widely they are used. Two of the biggest funders behind the development and pilot programs for Mosquirix, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said they were committing almost no additional financing to deploy the vaccine.
Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund, explained, "The fundamental issue with malaria isn't actually about tools. It's about the fact that we spend far too little money on it."
"We should have had this vaccine a long time ago," said Alassane Dicko, professor of public health at the University of Science, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako in Mali, who has led some of the Mosquirix trials.
Why World's First Malaria Shot Won't Reach Millions Of Children Who Need It (ibtimes.com)
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