Forbes reports a promising malaria vaccine produced by “the Oxford University team behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 shot”. It doesn’t say whether the technology developed for the Covid shot did anything to hasten this vaccine along. It still has some testing and licensing to go through.

The article has some horrifying stats on malaria, which is a major killer of children.

229 million. This is roughly how many cases of malaria there were around the world in 2019, according to the WHO. Around 400,000 died from the disease, which consistently ranks as one of the top ten causes of death in low income countries, despite falling significantly in recent years. Africa is disproportionately affected by the disease, with over 90% of cases occurring there. Children account for almost 70% of deaths. 

Forbes

Doing the math here (journalists, why can’t you do the math for me?), the death rate is about 0.2% of cases. If this is the death rate in Africa (but it could be higher if Africans receive less or lower quality treatment) and the other percentages hold, around 250,000 children in Africa die of malaria each year. From Our World in Data, the death toll in Africa from Covid-19 over the last year is around 120,000.

It occurs to me that countries where people deal with horrible diseases that mass murder children every year might be less horrified by Covid-19, which kills a fraction of older people. Of course I am not saying the lives of poor people have less value or the lives of older people have less value (although this is a perennial debate and people of all ages have a variety of reasonable opinions), but I think you can legitimately ask whether an available dollar should be invested in stopping Covid vs. other horrible diseases people have been dealing with for decades.