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A second reason was that – according to speculative post-hoc analyses of the data – there appeared to be a higher rate of meningitis in older children who received the vaccine than in those who didn’t. There also seemed to be a higher rate of deaths among young girls, but not boys – even though the total number of deaths in either group was small.

The WHO explained that these cases were not actually believed to be related to the vaccine itself: they weren’t related to the timing of the doses, only occurred in patients in two of the trial sites, and included different types of meningitis. Nevertheless, they argued, the disease needed to be ruled out as a potential side effect with more pilot studies.

Do you think this was the wrong call? Should they have started treatment and used that as a sort of much larger study? On purely cost benefit terms?

Wow this is a spectacular article, I have read stuff on the history of malaria before, but you packaged this particularly well

I had no idea just how torturous the path was for the RTSS malaria vaccine. I've heard lots of positive snippets over the years, but when the whole story is put together like this there seems to be as much frustration as success.

Have subscribed to further articles nice one.