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For anyone wondering, this is not an mRNA vaccine like the Covid ones. It's a recombinant protein vaccine that combines the target protein from the malaria parasite with one from Hepatitis B (simply to make it easier to purify). It contains and therefore conveys no genetic information.

It's not particularly effective, at only a 30% reduction of hospitalizations due to malaria. But this is still a huge improvement over our prior *nothing*- malaria kills over 600,000 people a year, and the vast majority of those are children. Put differently, out of ALL the deaths globally, malaria on its own accounts for over 1%. That's pretty damn significant for one communicable disease- most of the causes of death ahead of it are things like "heart disease" or "stroke" that have multiple causes. Attacking malaria is one of the most significant discrete (as opposed to the vague multi-origin causes of death mentioned above) global health improvements that can be made. It is probably the biggest single cause of childhood death- the only two causes of childhood mortality I can find listed ahead of it globally are "respiratory infections" and "diarrhea," both of which have a zillion actual causes.

Considering wonder drugs are anything that can work in 50% of people, 30% is good when taken in proper context.

Don’t we have a lot of other inexpensive drugs that fight malaria?