Ghana becomes first country to approve malaria vaccine

Ghana became the first country in the world to approve a new malaria vaccine.

The country’s drugs regulator said the vaccine, called R21, can be used in children aged between five months and three years old. This age group is at highest risk of death from malaria.

– Key points to note about the vaccine

Developed by Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, R21, also known as Matrix-M, showed 80% protection in early trials iand has been described as a “world-changer” by the scientists who developed it.

It requires three initial doses followed by a booster after one year, and is being considered for approval by the World Health Organization.

Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority approved the vaccine after a reportedly successful larger study, following a preliminary trial in Burkina Faso. The final trial covered nearly 5,000 children in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali and Tanzania.

The vaccine can be manufactured at mass scale and modest cost, “enabling as many as hundreds of millions of doses to be supplied to African countries” and reduce “over half a million malaria-related deaths annually,” according to the University of Oxford team behind it.

The Serum Institute of India is working on producing between 100-200 million doses per year and a vaccine factory is being built in Accra, Ghana’s capital.

– Why this matters

Malaria kills more than 600,000 people a year, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. Although the disease is also found in other subequatorial regions, like India, about 96% of all cases occur in Africa, WHO data shows.

Over half of those in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, and Burkina Faso.

The death rate from malaria has been declining for children under the age of five for the past several years, but this age group still makes up the lion’s share of the disease’s fatalities. They comprised nearly 80% of all malaria deaths in 2021, according to UNICEF.

The overall death rate from malaria dropped 40% between 2000 and 2015, according to the WHO.