Saturday 5 December 2020

Nothing Like the Same Degree of Urgency?

Just to amplify the point that I made about the financial imperatives that apply to large Drug Companies. The same Oxford team, that helped develop the Coronavirus vaccine in collaboration with AstraZeneca, are reported to be about to go into the final stage of testing for a vaccine for malaria (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/05/team-behind-oxford-covid-jab-start-final-stage-of-malaria-vaccine-trials). This mosquito-transmitted protist (a unicellular blood parasite) disease has been killing around 400,000 people a year, mainly in Africa. The University team do not seem to have anything like the same degree of financial backing for their malaria vaccine. They hope it will be available for use by 2024 but it will be interesting to see who will pay for it (and how they get it to where it is needed). At the very least, an extra 1,200,000 people (mainly children) will have died, by the time this vaccine might be approved. The vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic have clearly been developed on a different planet.

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