12 African nations, including Kenya and Ghana, will get the first-ever malaria vaccine.

In a news release dated July 5, Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, WHO, and UNICEF stated that Kenya is among the nations that had been delivering the vaccine through the Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme (MVIP) since 2019.
Other nations include Malawi and Ghana.
The initial 18 million dose allocation will allow nine additional nations, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, to introduce the vaccine into their routine immunization programs for the first time, according to the statement. Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi were also included in the list of recipients.
The notion of prioritizing doses to places where the risk of malaria disease and mortality among children is higher allowed for the allocation of restricted malaria vaccinations, and it was applied to choose the recipient countries.
The first doses of the vaccine should start to arrive in selected nations in the final quarter of this year, with a rollout beginning in early 2024.Nevertheless, at least 28 African nations have expressed interest in joining the group of 12 nations that have received the vaccine. According to Thabani Maphosa, Managing Director of the Global Malaria Initiative, “This vaccine has the potential to be very effective in the fight against malaria and, when widely deployed alongside other interventions, it can prevent tens of thousands of future deaths every year, “said Thabani Maphosa, Managing Director of Country Programmes Delivery at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
As we expand to a new total of 12 nations, we must ensure that the doses we have are used as effectively as possible while working with manufacturers to help ramp up supply. To do this, we must apply all the lessons we’ve learned from our pilot projects.
The launch, according to the vaccine alliance, will give African children who are more likely to die from malaria a better opportunity at improving their health and survival.
The World Health Organization estimates that malaria was responsible for 96% of all malaria infections and deaths worldwide in 2021, killing up to half a million children under the age of five each year.
A second vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, created by Oxford University and produced by Serum Institute of India (SII), is anticipated to be prequalified by WHO soon in order to satisfy demand as the annual global need for malaria vaccine rises.