Malaria Vaccines: WHO Position Paper - January 2016

Overview

In accordance with its mandate to provide guidance to Member States on health policy matters, WHO issues a series of regularly updated position papers on vaccines and combinations of vaccines against diseases that have an international public health impact. These papers are generally concerned with the use of vaccines in large-scale immunization programmes; they summarize essential background information on diseases and vaccines, and conclude with the current WHO position on the use of vaccines worldwide.

This is the first WHO position paper on a malaria vaccine. It focuses primarily on the available evidence concerning the only candidate malaria vaccine to have received a positive regulatory assessment, which was issued by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in July 2015.2 Recommendations on the potential use of this Plasmodium falciparum malaria vaccine were discussed by MPAC in October 2015; evidence presented at that SAGE meeting can be accessed at: http://www.who.int/ immunization/sage/previous/en/index.html.