First routine malaria jabs given to children

There are plans to vaccinate 6.6 million children this year and next in 20 countries in Africa.

Noah Ngah, the first baby to receive the malaria vaccine, and his twin sister, Judith, with their mother Helene in Soa, Cameroon, on Monday. Picture: AFP

The world’s first routine malaria vaccinations were administered on Monday, with their introduction in Cameroon hailed as a “historic milestone” in the battle against the disease.

Scientists have said that this moment has been “a long time coming”. There are plans to vaccinate 6.6 million children this year and next in 20 countries in Africa, where 96 per cent of all the world’s deaths from malaria occur.

An eight-month-old boy, Noah, received the first jab at a health facility in Soa, near Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. The World Health Organisation posted footage of the vaccine being administered, prompting tears from its infant recipient.

Helene, 32, who has six children, including Noah and his twin sister Judith, said: “I chose to vaccinate my twins because I’ve seen how harmful malaria can be. I’m committed to ensuring that my children get all four doses.”

The RTS,S vaccine, developed by GSK, the British-based manufacturer, was conceived and designed in the late 1980s. A phase one safety trial began at the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1997, while phase three clinical trials took place in seven African countries between 2009 and 2014.

Pilot schemes began in Burkina Faso and Mali in 2017 and in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi in 2018 but it took until 2021 for the vaccine to be ready for final approval and administering as part of routine vaccination programmes.

A third of a million doses were delivered to Cameroon in November to allow time to train health workers and to raise awareness among the population of 27 million. It is being given alongside other childhood immunisations.

The program is being overseen by Gavi, a public-private partnership in Switzerland that was created in 1999 to boost access to vaccinations after a pledge of $US750m from Bill Gates and his wife at the time, Melinda.

RTS,S is not only the world’s first malaria vaccine but the first for any disease caused by a parasite. It is also, its inventors have said, the first jab invented from scratch with the aim of saving poor children in sub-Saharan Africa rather than protecting rich westerners.

The annual global death toll from malaria has roughly halved since 2000, but in recent years the decline has stalled. The disease can cause physical and intellectual impairment for life in those who survive. In many African regions children have on average six malaria episodes a year. Almost half a million children under five die from malaria each year in Africa.

The vaccine trains the body to fend off Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of five parasites that cause the disease and the most common in Africa. It does this by exposing a child’s immune system to a protein found on the outside of the parasite in its early life cycle.

Abdulaziz Mohammed of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said: “Today marks a historic milestone in our enduring fight against malaria.” He said malaria was a “major reason for school absenteeism, anaemia and impaired cognitive development”, and the vaccine can help to “unleash the full potential of our future generations”.

A second malaria vaccine called R21/Matrix-M, developed by scientists at the University of Oxford, was approved by the World Health Organisation last year. The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest maker of vaccines by volume, has said it can produce 100 million doses of the Oxford jab each year.

The Times