Nigeria Missing On List For 18m Africa Malaria Vaccine Dose Initiative

Despite reportedly having one of Africa’s highest malaria deaths, Nigeria is missing on list of African countries to benefit an African malaria vaccine initiative of  18m doses.

Gavi, the World Health Organistion (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) yesterday, indicated Ghana, Kenya and Malawi as Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme countries with 12 new African countries set to join..

Nigeria is neither in the existing list nor in the latest one that has Cameroon, Niger and Burkina Faso, Benin, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Others are Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda, but Nigeria as last year’s data, reportedly lost over $1.1 billion (N645.7 billion) preventing and treating malaria, with the Managing Director of Country Programmes Delivery, at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Mr Thabani Maphosa, stating that vaccine has the potential to be very impactful in the fight against malaria effectively
deployed alongside other interventions.

In the course of the marking of the malaria day last year, there were reports that malaria killed no fewer than 200,000 Nigerians and afflicted 61 million others in 2021.

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Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), Tanzania and Mozambique were listed as accounting for over half of all malaria deaths in the region, and these are so, Nigeria missing on list for 18m africa malaria vaccine dose initiative, should be a course for concern.

Speaking on its latest initiative however, the coalition observed that “The roll out is a critical step forward in the fight against one of the leading causes of death on the continent”, adding that it would priorities doses to areas where the risk of malaria illness and death among children are
highest.

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“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,

“Others are the Vaccine Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Unitaid.

“The RTS,S/AS01 vaccine has been administered to more than 1.7 million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi since 2019. It has been shown to be safe and effective, resulting in both a Twenty eight African countries, it added have expressed interest in receiving
the malaria vaccine.

And that also, that 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.