Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 22, 2024
Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 22, 2024
Keep Funding Vital Vaccines, Supercharge the Malaria Vaccine Rollout!
There’s encouraging bipartisan agreement on increasing U.S. funding for Gavi, a vital global alliance providing vaccines against deadly diseases to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.
Tell Congress to fund them even more to speed up the rollout of vital new malaria vaccines across Africa!
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Reasons For Hope
In 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration pledged a five-year commitment of at least $1.58 billion in U.S. support for Gavi (formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation). Even better, it looks like there’s actually some bipartisan support in Congress to fund that pledge (and maybe even increase it!) in the next federal budget.
Gavi is a critical global coalition dedicated to manufacturing and deploying vaccines against deadly diseases to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people. The new U.S. pledge is really important, really good news: by number of human lives saved per dollar, funding Gavi is probably the single most important and effective thing the United States government is doing right now, saving millions of lives for relatively small amounts of money.
“One recent paper studying Gavi's initial rollout from its founding through 2016 estimated that it saved about 9 million lives, at a cost of $118 each. Another paper using a different empirical strategy put the cost per life saved higher (between $4,265 and $17,059) but still very low in the scheme of things. Expanding Medicaid in the US, for instance, saves a life for about $5.4 million, or at least 300 times more than Gavi vaccinations.”
-Vox
But there’s amazing potential to go even further. Right now, at this moment in history, any additional funding for Gavi will have a disproportionately huge impact, as brilliant new inventions have just opened up a whole new front against one of the world’s worst diseases. With extra funding, Gavi could help speed up the global rollout of malaria vaccines, one of the most important yet underreported changes happening the world right now.
Malaria is one of the deadliest enemies of the human species. We’ve been fighting malaria for generations, and heroically eradicated it in much of the world, but the mosquito-borne parasite is still hanging on in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2022 there were 249 million malaria cases globally and about 608,000 malaria deaths, with about 95% of the deaths taking place in Africa and 77% being children under the age of five. Many scientists are concerned that climate change will increase malaria risk by expanding the preferred habitat of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (warm and wet).
Fortunately, at long last we are beginning to make some serious progress that brings closer the dream of eradicating malaria. After years of painstaking research and development work1, humanity is now working to deploy not one but two cutting-edge new malaria vaccines: the earlier-invented “first draft2” RTS,S “Mosquirix” vaccine and the newer, likely-even-better R21/Matrix-M vaccine.
In January 2024, Cameroon has begun the world’s first routine childhood vaccination program against malaria (YAY!!!), offering four doses of the RTS,S malaria vaccine free of charge to all infants up to six months old. Twenty more countries are following them in rolling out similar programs in 2024.
And on May 24, 2024, UNICEF flew in 43,000 doses of the cutting-edge R21 malaria vaccine to the impoverished and strife-torn Central African Republic, with 120,000 more doses to follow, making the CAR the first country in the world to receive thousands of R21 doses. Further R21 shipments are set to arrive in Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Uganda as well.
More funding will make this happen faster and in more places, saving more lives.
Getting malaria vaccines to where they’re needed is a gigantic win for human well-being (and should happen as soon as possible!). With the malaria vaccines beginning to roll out in 2024, humanity is starting an epic project to spare the poorest and most vulnerable people of Earth from debilitating illness by the millions and save children’s lives by the tens of thousands, using our ingenuity to defeat one of our species’ most ancient enemies. Not to mention, we’re defeating one of the biggest threats posed by climate change (a potential resurgence of malaria) before it has a chance to really get going. This is spectacular news!
Tell Congress to fund Gavi even more to speed up the rollout of malaria vaccines!
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The Mosquirix vaccine was developed by GlaxoSmithKline and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
R21 was developed by an international collaboration including the University of Oxford, Novavax, the Serum Institute of India, and others.
Mosquirix is great (and amazingly better than nothing) but it’s not perfect: it reduces hospital admissions by “only” about 30%, and efficacy can vary. It’s very much a “first draft” vaccine. It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison between Mosquirix’s 30% reduction in hospitalization rates and R21’s up to 80% efficacy rate but it’s pretty close.
This is simply great news on the vaccine roll-outs! I love these improvements in the human condition.. it seems we're knocking one of the Four Horsemen off his steed.