A jab that will be a real shot in the arm for humanity

THE world can seem a pretty grim place sometimes. From Covid disruption to climate change modelling, continuing constitutional squabbles to warnings of a desperate winter for the NHS, bleak and depressing news is not hard to find.

But this week, there was a genuine shaft of light, one of these generational game-changers which will impact humanity for the better.

A malaria vaccine has been approved for use in children in Africa. It doesn’t sound much. As a country that’s benefited hugely from Covid vaccinations that were developed in about a year, it may seem almost laggardly that we’re more than 100 years on from when work first started on a malaria jab.

But malaria isn’t a basic respiratory virus. It is caused by a far more sophisticated parasite, one that has evolved to dodge human immune systems. It even changes within the body so the form it takes when attacking cells in the liver is different to the way it goes after red blood cells.

It’s also a massive killer, disproportionately targeting the young. Over the past decade, malaria has killed almost four million people, two-and-a-half million of them children under the age of five.

This new vaccine, developed in the UK, is administered from five months old. While it is only 39 per cent effective in preventing malaria, when combined with other antimalarial drugs it can reduce hospitalisation and death by 70 per cent.

The director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, could not have been clearer about its significance. He said: ‘I started my career as a malaria researcher, and I longed for the day that we would have an effective vaccine against this ancient and terrible disease. And today is that day, a historic day.’

The vaccine, called ‘RTS,S’, has had a difficult birth. Developed over decades by scientists and researchers at GlaxoSmithKline, it went through extensive clinical trials before being rolled out to nearly a million children in pilot projects across three countries.

But history is littered with breakthroughs that don’t come alone and this looks likely to be added to the canon.

Work by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University has produced another vaccine which they say reaches the WHO target of 75 per cent efficacy. After a small trial in Burkina Faso, thousands more children will be given the jab across four more countries to make sure it works in real life.

The saying ‘not all superheroes wear capes’ has been adopted in popular culture to praise people who have done something to make a positive difference. But even superheroes like Batman and Superman only saved people in small numbers at a time.

The work being done in labs across the world to develop vaccine and drug treatments has the ability to save millions. Whether it is fast-tracking Covid jabs in 12 months or the long hard years pursuing a malaria inoculation, the biggest superheroes on the planet right now wear lab coats.

I wish more attention was paid to this genuinely world-altering good news story, which got just a fraction of the air time that reports of some petrol stations being temporarily out of fuel garnered.

We should care about what is happening in countries and to peoples outside our own borders, but also because curing disease abroad improves health security everywhere, including at home.

I also want stories like this to get the recognition they deserve to inspire the next generation.

Somewhere there is a small boy or girl who has seen the good that research can do and who is now dreaming of growing up to be a scientist and to cure diseases. A child that knows superheroes in lab coats can, and do, save the most lives.