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.