By Ben Eguzozie.
Nigeria has been left out of a list of African countries slated to benefit from 18 million doses of malaria vaccine rollout for the continent. Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced three countries: Ghana, Kenya and Malawi as malaria vaccine implementation programme nations, with 12 other countries to join the rollout later.
According to Thabani Maphosa, managing director of country programmes delivery at Gavi, the RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine, the result of 30 years of research and development by GSK and through partnership with PATH, with support from a network of African research centres, has the potential to be quite impactful in the fight against malaria, if effectively deployed alongside other interventions.
WHO, Gavi and UNICEF also announced Cameroon, Niger and Burkina Faso, Benin, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda as other African countries that would later follow in the vaccine dose implementation initiative. Nigeria, with 200,000 deaths and more than 61 million cases in 2021 alone, is reportedly one of the world’s and Africa’s countries with highest malaria deaths.
Also, data from the WHO indicate that Nigeria last year (2022) reportedly lost over $1.1 billion (N645.7 billion) preventing and treating malaria. Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), Tanzania and Mozambique are listed as accounting for over half of all malaria deaths in Africa.
A health practitioner and disease management expert told Business A.M. that the case of Nigeria missing on the list of African countries slated to benefit from the 18 million doses Africa malaria vaccine initiative, should be a course for serious concern.
Gavi, however, observed that the roll out (of the 18 million vaccine doses) is a critical step forward in the fight against one of the leading causes of death on the continent, adding that it would prioritise doses to areas where the risk of malaria illness and death among children are highest.
“Since 2019, Ghana, Kenya and Malawi have been delivering the malaria vaccine through the Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme (MVIP), coordinated by WHO and funded by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,” the Gavi boss said.
Since 2019, the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine has been administered to more than 1.7 million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. It has been shown to be safe and effective. In particular, 28 African countries have expressed interest in receiving the malaria vaccine.
The first doses of the vaccine are expected to arrive in countries during the last quarter of 2023, with countries starting to roll them out by early 2024, the global health institutions said.
