After decades of work, the World Health Organization endorsed the first-ever malaria vaccine last year - a historic milestone that promised to drive back a disease that kills a child every minute.
In reality, efforts are falling well short of that, with a lack of funding and commercial potential thwarting GSK Plc's capacity to produce as many doses of its shot as needed, according to Reuters interviews with about a dozen WHO officials, GSK staff, scientists and non-profit groups.
Yet the world's inability to fund more Mosquirix shots dismays many in Africa. Children on the continent account for the vast majority of the roughly 600,000 global malaria deaths every year. The limited international appetite to produce and distribute more Mosquirix stands in stark contrast to the record speed and funds with which wealthy countries secured vaccines for COVID-19, a disease that poses relatively little risk to children.
Yet even hitting 15 million could take years, according to several officials at the WHO and elsewhere in the malaria effort who said wider distribution beyond the pilot countries was unlikely before early 2024, and even then it would start slowly. GSK said a WHO decision to collect additional data on safety and effectiveness from the pilot programs had added years to the launch process, during which it had to idle a dedicated production facility.
Its regulatory pathway has also been slow. In 2015, GSK published results from a large-scale clinical trial showing vaccine reduced the risk of severe malaria by about 30%. The WHO sought more data on the shot's safety and effectiveness, gathering information from 2019 during the pilot vaccination programs, before endorsing Mosquirix.
Two of the biggest funders behind the development and pilot programs for Mosquirix, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told Reuters they were committing almost no additional financing to deploy the vaccine.
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