The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday that the only malaria vaccine approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) should be widely distributed to African children, potentially marking a major step forward in the fight against a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.

RTS,S, or Mosquirix, is a vaccine produced by GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company.

In a large-scale trial program supervised by the WHO, 2.3 million doses of Mosquirix have been given to babies in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi since 2019. The illness kills the majority of children under the age of five.

Following a decade of clinical studies in seven African nations, this initiative was launched.

“We are really proud of this vaccination since it was created in Africa by African scientists,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“Using this vaccine in addition to existing techniques to combat malaria might save tens of thousands of young lives each year,” he said, referring to malaria prevention measures such as bed nets and spraying.

In Africa, malaria is considerably more dangerous than COVID-19. According to a WHO estimate, it killed 386,000 Africans in 2019, compared to 212,000 verified fatalities from COVID-19 in the previous 18 months.

The WHO says 94% of malaria cases and deaths occur in Africa, a continent of 1.3 billion people. The preventable disease is caused by parasites transmitted to people by the bites of infected mosquitoes; symptoms include fever, vomiting and fatigue.

“This is how we fight malaria, layering imperfect tools on top of each other,” said Ashley Birkett, who leads global malaria vaccine work at Path, a non-profit global health organization that has funded the development of the vaccine with GSK and the three-country pilot.

Another vaccine against malaria, developed by scientists at Britain’s University of Oxford and called R21/Matrix-M, showed up to 77% efficacy in a year-long study involving 450 children in Burkina Faso, researchers said in April, but it is still in the trial stages.

GSK also welcomed the WHO recommendation.

GSK shares held steady in New York following the announcement, which came after the close of trading in its London-listed shares.

FUNDING CHALLENGE

The recommendation was jointly announced in Geneva by the WHO’s top advisory bodies for malaria and immunization, the Malaria Policy Advisory Group and the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.

Experts said the challenge now would be mobilizing financing for production and distribution of the vaccine to some of the world’s poorest countries.

GSK has to date committed to produce 15 million doses of Mosquirix annually, in addition to the 10 million doses donated to the WHO pilot programmes, up to 2028 at a cost of production plus no more than 5% margin.

A global market study led by the WHO this year projected demand for a malaria vaccine would be 50 to 110 million doses per year by 2030 if it is deployed in areas with moderate to high transmission of the disease.

The GAVI vaccine alliance, a global public-private partnership, will consider in December whether and how to finance the vaccination programme.

“As we’ve seen from the COVID vaccine, where there is political will, there is funding available to ensure that vaccines are scaled to the level they are needed,” said Kate O’Brien, Director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals.

A source familiar with planning for the vaccine’s development said the price per dose was not yet set, but would be confirmed after GAVI’s funding decision and once there is a clear sense of demand for the vaccine.

The WHO’s decision had personal meaning for Dr. Rose Jalong’o, a vaccinology specialist at the Kenyan health ministry.

“I suffered from malaria as a child and during my internship, and during my clinical years I attended to children in hospital because of severe malaria who needed blood transfusion and unfortunately some of them died.”

“It’s a disease I have grown up with and, seeing all this in my lifetime, it’s an exciting time.”