World Malaria Day 2025: what's new, what's not

Toby Tremlett🔹

Another year, another World Malaria Day.

WHO reports that an estimated 263 million cases and 597 000 malaria deaths occurred worldwide in 2023, with 95% of the deaths occuring in Africa.

What’s still the case:

Malaria is still one of the top five causes of death for children under 5.

The Our World In Data page on Malaria is still a fantastic resource to learn about Malaria.

What’s different this year:

NB- this post is far from comprehensive. I'd appreciate people adding more information about the development of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes, or the speed of the malaria vaccine roll-outs in the comments.

Malaria vaccines.

We are now over a year into the launch of routine malaria vaccinations in Africa. GAVI has reported that 12 million doses of vaccines have been delivered to 17 countries. There are also very positive signs from the pilot, which ran from 2019-23 in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, as to the efficacy of the vaccine:

“Coordinated by WHO and funded by Gavi and partners, this pilot [run from 2019-23 in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi] reached over 2 million children, and demonstrated that the malaria vaccine led to a significant reduction in malaria illnesses, a 13% drop in overall child mortality and even higher reductions in hospitalizations.”

Cuts to foreign aid

In effective altruism spaces, we often hear about specific, highly effective charities, such as the Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium.

But these charities can run such specific and effective programmes because of the larger ecosystem of which they are a part. This ecosystem runs on funding from WHO member states and philanthropists, and involves organisations such as GAVI and the Global Fund. The funding sources of these organisations are at risk due to the foreign aid pause in the US, and (to a lesser, but still significant extent) foreign aid cuts in the UK.

Additionally, services provided by the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) were paused by the Trump administration. Despite waivers, it’s hard to figure out how many people have and will be affected by the pause, and whether people are receiving the treatment they need. As of March, these cuts were affecting the Against Malaria Foundation.

If you'd like to take a moment to reflect on this, my colleague Frances Lorenz's short fiction piece is helpful (though it’s technically about PEPFAR and HIV, the story is the same for Malaria).

If you want to do something right now, you can donate to AMF or the Malaria Consortium.

65 Reactions

Comments2

Sorted by

New & upvoted

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:15 AM

RasoolApr 268

The Center for Global Development has a blog post from December talking about the vaccine rollout which I have been meaning to post on the EA forum with a summary and thoughts but in the meantime here is an AI-assisted overview:

Key Takeaways:

The Opportunity: Two new malaria vaccines (RTS,S and R21) are a major scientific breakthrough. Gavi currently plans to vaccinate 52 million children by 2030, potentially saving 180,000 lives.
The Gap: However, under current slow rollout plans, ~2.5 million children will still die from malaria unvaccinated by 2030. Faster, broader deployment of these vaccines could prevent an additional ~800,000 child deaths by then.
Cost-Effectiveness: The R21 vaccine appears highly cost-effective, estimated at ~$4,200 per life saved (including rollout costs). This rivals top global health interventions. It's significantly cheaper ($3.90/dose) and has much higher production capacity (~100M doses/year) than RTS,S ($9.80/dose, ~8M doses/year), with similar reported efficacy.
Bottlenecks to Scale:
1. Funding: A major funding gap exists for both vaccine procurement (~$1.1B-$1.7B needed beyond current plans for full infant coverage) and crucially, for rollout/delivery (~$500M-$1B+, based on pilot costs).
2. Vaccine Choice: Prioritizing the more expensive, supply-constrained RTS,S over the cheaper, readily available R21 limits the number of lives saved per dollar spent.
3. Eligibility Rules: Nigeria (1/3 of global malaria deaths) and Angola are largely ineligible for Gavi support due to income thresholds, massively hindering impact in high-burden areas.
4. Rollout Strategy: Current plans focus on gradual infant rollouts. A faster "catch-up" campaign including older children (up to 5 years, as WHO guidance allows) could save significantly more lives sooner, but requires more upfront funding and logistical capacity.

RasoolApr 266

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) often has higher estimates for Malaria deaths than the WHO.

For instance in 2021, the WHO estimated 619,000 deaths globally from Malaria, whereas IHME had 748,000

There is a comparison (and much more other interesting data) on the Our World in Data Malaria page