HERALDING THE MALARIA VACCINE

The malaria vaccine for children is a significant milestone

With justifiable fanfare, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced its endorsement of the first malaria vaccine for children in the world. The vaccine code-named RTS.S and manufactured by the drug firm GKS was endorsed after clinical trials involving two million doses in three countries: Ghana, Malawi, and Kenya. This development is a breakthrough for public health, especially in sub-Sahara Africa where, according to the World Malaria Report 2016, accounted for 92 per cent of the 212 million new malaria cases and 429,000 deaths worldwide in 2015. That same year, according to a report of the Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), at least 51 million Nigerians tested positive to the malaria parasite.

The Director, Malaria Project, Society for Family Health, Dr. Ernest Nwokolo, once resorted to scary imagery to underline the depth of the malaria scourge in Nigeria. He said the 800 Nigerians deaths recorded daily in the country due to malaria was like crashing two-full capacity Boeing 747 aircraft with no survivor every day. His data corresponded with a submission by former United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. James Entwistle, that malaria “is responsible for 60 per cent of outpatient visits to health facilities, 30 per cent of childhood deaths, 25 per cent of deaths in children under one year and 11 per cent of maternal deaths” in Nigeria.

Coming in the wake of the vaccine against the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, which is still ravaging the world, the malaria vaccine is another significant milestone for humanity in the battle against the diseases that afflict many and kill a significant number. It is a tribute to the tenacity and hard work of the researchers and scientists who worked on the malaria vaccine that the day has finally come when the world can deploy the tool of science and technology to combat the contagion that has claimed the lives of millions of people over several decades.

However, the endorsement of the vaccine is only the beginning of the battle that needs to be waged on the malaria scourge in Africa. As the experience with Covid-19 pandemic has shown, it is one thing to have vaccine availability and quite a different thing to get the affected public to patronise the vaccine. This challenge is more in an African environment like ours where long held superstitions and unscientific beliefs have tended to obstruct the application of modern scientific methods in disease control and treatment. As has been demonstrated by persisting irrational resistance to the Covid-19 vaccine in many parts of the world, the psychological battle to compel vaccine acceptance may be as challenging as the process of development of the vaccines themselves. It is therefore compelling urgent for African governments to draw on the experience of the Covid-19 vaccine to ensure a speedy and widespread acceptance and application of the new malaria vaccine.

Meanwhile, the development of the malaria vaccine has taken a long time. For quite some time, there was the belief that vested interests in the pharmaceutical industry reaping huge profits from selling anti malaria drugs were not in any hurry to fund or facilitate the development of a malaria vaccine. The logic was that the introduction of a vaccine would shrink the market for curative and prophylactic anti-malaria drugs. Rightly or wrongly, this factor cannot be dismissed easily. A subset of this logic of big pharma conspiracy was the fact that African countries lacked the facilities and personnel to pursue independent research and development efforts on malaria and other public health emergency diseases that afflict the continent.

Now that there is a breakthrough, we urge the government to begin an enlightenment campaign that will ensure that the new vaccine is accepted and patronised when it is available in Nigeria.