Promising malaria vaccine.

Very promising. “We can maybe hope to just wipe out the filthy thing” kind of promising. From the BBC: “A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.

I was trying to come up with a natural disaster to compare with malaria, until I realized: that is precisely backwards. Malaria is what you compare natural disasters to. It’s a steady killer of hundreds of thousands of human beings, every year. If I could wipe out the Anopheles mosquito with a snap of my fingers I would have done it twenty years ago, and never mind what it might do to my arm*. A 77% effective vaccine sounds absolutely grand.

Moe Lane

*In fact… I just tried, on general principles. No luck, unfortunately. No, seriously, I’d have given up my left arm to make that happen.

4 thoughts on “Promising malaria vaccine.”

  1. Agreed, 77% would be great. And the Anopheles mosquito? Kill them all, Nature would adapt.

    1. Unfortunately, indiscriminate use of DDT would not kill only the evil mosquito. It wouldn’t even kill all the evil mosquito. What we need is ebola for evil mosquitos.

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