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Earlier this week, thousands of children in Côte d’Ivoire and South Sudan started receiving their first shots of the R21 malaria vaccine. This vaccine, developed by scientists in the United Kingdom and manufactured in India, is being rolled out alongside another vaccine that has already been administered to more than two million children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, where it reduced all-cause mortality by 13%.
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you’ll know how excited we are about this story. Malaria is the poster child for Pestilence. It’s killed more people than almost anything else—by some estimates, around 5% of all deaths, ever. It still kills half a million children annually. Now, after 70 years of trial and error, we have two cheap and effective vaccines that give us a serious shot at eradicating it in the next decade or two.
We think this is one of the most important stories in the world right now, and yet every time we report on a new batch of funding, or a shipment arriving in a new country, we’re baffled by how scarce the coverage is. We know good news doesn't sell, but surely the prospect of saving tens of thousands of lives deserves more than 1/10,000th of the stories written about the US presidential election?
So instead of complaining about the lack of media attention, we’ve decided to do something about it.
Starting this week, we’re kicking off production on an audio documentary that will take us inside the labs where the vaccine was made and the corridors where the deals were done. We’ll be speaking to healthcare workers doing the hard yards on the ground, and to the communities who have carried the burden of this disease and are now on the frontlines of a public health initiative that could change the fate of millions.
The journey of developing, testing, and delivering these vaccines has been anything but straightforward. It’s an epic story filled with twists and turns, backroom machinations, triumphs agains the odds, larger-than-life characters, and last-minute breakthroughs. The stakes are high. The impact is personal, and the scale is global.
The question we’re asking ourselves is: “Can we create a podcast that’s as compelling as a true crime drama, except about one of the greatest human stories of all time?” We think we’ve got a shot at it. Our plan is to find out what it takes, and who it takes, to make and distribute millions of doses of a life-saving vaccine across an entire continent. We want to show you how progress actually happens, and we want to make it so good you won’t be able to stop listening.
This is our first piece of big, original reporting for Fix The News. We don’t know how the story will unfold as we move through production, but we’re bringing you along for the ride anyway. Starting next week, we’ll be posting regular updates about how it's going.