According to Reuters, 20 million doses of a new malaria vaccine are ready for purchase this year, and African nations are lined up to approve it.
The pharmaceutical regulatory body of Nigeria joined Ghana this week in endorsing the novel R21 vaccination, making them the first nations worldwide to do so. Scientists from Oxford University created this vaccine, which was produced by the Serum Institute of India.
Historically, the U.N. agency has been used by African nations without significant resources for drug control to conduct early reviews of new medications.
Public access to thorough information on the results of the malaria vaccine's large-scale studies is currently limited. Furthermore, it's also unclear how low-income nations will manage the cost of the immunization.
However, new initiatives to improve medication control in the region and the urgency of combating a disease that kills more than 600,000 people yearly in Africa south of the Sahara, most of them children under the age of 5, are altering the process.
In a high-level conference this week, the World Health Organization announced that regulatory agencies from at least ten African nations are presently reviewing trial data to assess the vaccine. In the next weeks, it's expected that the vaccine will receive clearance from other nations.
The leader of the WHO's malaria vaccine implementation program, Mary Hamel, said at the expert gathering on Tuesday, "We expect many more countries to come through." They are independent nations with the authority to choose their own vaccination policies.
She made no explicit mention of the potential affected nations. It is important to note that Tanzania and Kenya have strict regulatory frameworks and rather high incidence of the disease.
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