In MalariaWorld this week there is a study that found that implementing the malaria vaccine would lead to significant increase in Uganda’s immunization budget and the overall health sector budgets. In ‘The Cost and Budget Impact of Malaria Vaccine Introduction in Uganda’ Ochanda et al examined the cost impact of the addition of doses of the RTS,S (Mosquirix from GSK) to Uganda’s immunisation programme. The five-year net cost would be US$141m. The five-year estimate of malaria treatment costs without immunization would be US$6m. The malaria expenditure costs with immunisation are over 20 times the cost without!
We have discussed malaria vaccines many times before especially highlighting the very poor clinical trials and underwhelming performance in manufacturer sponsored trials. Malaria vaccines were tested in trials with Rabies vaccines used as controls instead of harmless placebos (Rabipur manufactured by GSK, Marburg, Germany and owned by Bavarian Nordic, Hellerup, Denmark was used as the control in RTS,S study). So the benefit presented in this paper reduction of five-year malaria treatment costs from $6m to $1.5m is based on dubious information. And this cost of treatment is dwarfed by the vaccine cost of $147m based on a cost of $5 per dose.
It is extremely unclear why the leaders of Uganda and other African countries are cooperating with foreign drug countries in trials of these materials that are useless, costly and probably harmful. Thankfully, as reported by NTV Uganda in December, the people are not fooled ‘Low Uptake of R21 Vaccine in Uganda’.