After decades of research and development, two new malaria vaccines entered routine administration this year. This is a huge win for science, and potentially for humanity. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, projects that these vaccines will save 180,000 children’s lives by 2030. But over the same time period, even after all the global expenditure on bed nets and malaria drugs, roughly 2.5 million children will die of malaria unvaccinated. We now have a new technology that could save about a third of those kids – roughly 800,000 additional child deaths that could be averted with vaccines by 2030, but won’t be under current plans for a gradual rollout.
Avoiding Another Lost Decade to Malaria Vaccines, a collaborative policy paper developed between The Center for Global Development’s Justin Sandefur and 1Day Sooner’s Ryan Duncombe and Karam Elabd, asked this question to government officials across Africa, staff at Gavi, the WHO, and the US President’s Malaria Initiative, and international NGOs like PATH.
Read the top takeaways in this Center for Global Development blog post.