Drugmaker GSK cannot produce enough of the Mosquirix vaccine to meet the vast demand without more donor funds
London/Kisumu —
A GSK spokesperson told Reuters that it could not make enough of its vaccine Mosquirix to meet the vast demand without more funds from international donors, without giving details on the numbers of doses it expected to produce annually in the first years of the rollout. “Mosquirix has the potential to save a lot of precious lives before another new vaccine arrives,” said Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, a public health specialist leading a pilot vaccination programme in Ghana. “The more we wait, the more children die needlessly.”
Unlike many pharmaceutical products, there is no major market for a malaria vaccine in the developed world, where drug companies typically make the large profits that they say allows them to make their products available at far lower prices in poorer countries. Yet even hitting 15-million could take years, according to several officials at the WHO and elsewhere in the malaria effort who said wider distribution beyond the pilot countries was unlikely before early 2024, and even then it would start slowly.
GSK said a WHO decision to collect additional data on safety and effectiveness from the pilot programmes had added years to the launch process, during which it had to idle a dedicated production facility. Its regulatory pathway has also been slow. In 2015, GSK published results from a large-scale clinical trial showing the vaccine reduced the risk of severe malaria by about 30%. The WHO sought more data on the shot’s safety and effectiveness, gathering information from 2019 during the pilot vaccination programmes, before endorsing Mosquirix.
“It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s relatively expensive compared to other interventions used for malaria,” said Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund. “The fundamental issue with malaria isn’t actually about tools. It’s about the fact that we spend far too little money on it.”
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