First the Covid vaccine, now a malaria one: The race is on to beat zoonotic diseases as climate change spreads them all over the world.

Photo: CDC Global

It was a historic day, decades in the making. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization endorsed the first-ever malaria vaccine for children in sub-Saharan Africa. Global health experts hailed it as an important move forward that would save thousands of lives. But they also wondered: What took so long? 

The vaccine, known as RTS,S, was developed by GlaxoSmithKline in 1987. “Why are we using that, and getting excited about it, and having press releases, in 2021?” asked Adrian Hill, the director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford and chief investigator of another malaria vaccine currently in trials. Read more at The New Republic.