New vaccine is 77% effective against Africa’s biggest killer

New vaccine is 77% effective against Africa’s biggest killer

Researchers in Britain have developed the world’s most effective malaria vaccine,

with it becoming the first to achieve the World Health Organization-specified 75 percent efficacy goal.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and their partners have reported findings from a Phase IIb trial of a candidate malaria vaccine, dubbed ‘R21/Matrix-M’, which demonstrated 77 percent efficacy over 12 months of follow-up.

They hope the vaccine can be approved for use within the next two years, building on the speed and lessons learned through the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Professor Adrian Hill, who is director of the Jenner Institute, and Lakshmi Mittal and Family Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford,

also led the research behind the AstraZeneca and Oxford coronavirus vaccine.

Malaria killed at least four times as many more people in Africa last year as COVID did

And nobody for a moment questioned whether COVID should have an emergency use review and authorization in Africa

So why shouldn’t a disease that firstly kills children rather than older people,

certainly, killed an awful lot more, be prioritized for emergency use authorization in Africa?

Nobody’s really ever asked that question before COVID,

but we’re going to do so, and have been doing so, and regulators are sounding interested.

Normally this would take three to five years to do a phase three trial

in that time 300,000 children in Africa will die every year of malaria

Hill said researchers hoped to report the results of the final stage of the trial next year.

Asked how confident he was that the efficacy could be replicated in the next phase of the trial,

Hill told the PA news agency the researchers were “pretty confident