Mozambique has launched the first phase of its inaugural malaria vaccination campaign for children, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated. The campaign started on Monday, targeting 6-to-11-month-olds in the central province of Zambézia, and is being rolled out as part of an existing immunisation programme.
The country’s health ministry said that limited supplies of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine – which was only approved by the WHO last October – meant it had to be deployed selectively. Zambézia, Mozambique’s second most-populous province, was chosen to go first due to the high death rate its children experienced after contracting mosquito-borne disease.
“If the vaccine were not in short supply, we would introduce it nationwide simultaneously,” Minister of Health Armindo Tiago was reported as saying. The campaign was expected to expand into other parts of the country next year, depending on vaccine availability.
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Tiago noted that 196 people in Mozambique had died due to malaria so far this year, out of six million diagnosed cases. The southern African country currently holds about 800,000 doses of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine, which is administered in a four-dose schedule.
Developed by the UK’s Oxford University, R21/Matrix-M is the second malaria vaccine to be approved for use in children. It was first deployed last month, in Côte d’Ivoire. The other approved vaccine, called RTS,S, was first used in 2019 in Malawi. Mozambique is the 11th country in Africa to start immunising against malaria, according to Gavi (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) – which helped fund the current campaign.
There were 249 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2022, according to WHO data, and 608,000 of those people died from the disease. African countries accounted for about 95 percent of both figures, with children under 5 accounting for almost 80 percent of deaths in the region.
