Month: October 2021

A nurse administers the world's first malaria vaccine during a 2019 pilot program in Ghana. The World Health Organization has now recommended the vaccine for use in countries with moderate to high levels of malaria transmission. Cristina Aldehuela /AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Cristina Aldehuela /AFP via Getty Images A nurse administers the world's first malaria vaccine during a 2019 pilot program in Ghana. The World Health Or...

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday the only approved vaccine against malaria should be widely given to African children, marking a major advance against a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. The WHO recommendation is for RTS,S, sold as “Mosquirix”, a vaccine developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline. Since 2019, 2.3 million doses of Mosquirix have been administered to infants in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in a large-scale pilot programme coordinated by the WHO. The majority of those whom the disease kills are aged under five. That programme followed a decade of clinical trials in seven African countries. “This long-awaited malaria vaccine is a breakthrough for science. This is a vaccine developed in Africa by African scientists and we’...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been much uncertainty about how long immunity lasts after an unvaccinated person is infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now a team of scientists led by faculty at Yale School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte have an answer: Strong protection following natural infection is short-lived. “Reinfection can reasonably happen in three months or less,” said Jeffrey Townsend, the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “Therefore, those who have been naturally infected should get vaccinated. Previous infection alone can offer very little long-term protection against subsequent infections.” The study, published in the journal The Lancet Microbe, is the first to...

In September, news broke that a new coronavirus mutation — the mu variant, formally known as B.1.621 — could potentially evade vaccine-induced immunity. "This variant has a constellation of mutations that suggests that it would evade certain antibodies, not only monoclonal antibodies, but vaccine- and convalescent serum-induced antibodies," President Joe Biden's COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters in September. "But there isn't a lot of clinical data to suggest that. It is mostly laboratory in-vitro data." At the time, the idea of a vaccine-resistant variant sent a shockwave of fear through the world. The dreaded delta variant was already known to be more resistant to vaccines than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. Could mu, which was first discovered in Colombia, be worse than...