The World Health Organization on Monday issued a recommendation for a second malaria vaccine to prevent one of the deadliest and oldest viruses in human history.

“As a malaria researcher, I used to dream of the day we would have a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. Now we have two,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

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The new R21/Matrix-M vaccine was developed by scientists at Oxford University to combat the mosquito-borne disease and is slated to become available to countries by mid-2024, with each dose costing between $2 and $4.

The WHO said that the R21/Matrix-M vaccine and the RTS,S/AS01, which was approved by the WHO in 2021, are both safe and effective in preventing malaria in children. The demand for the RTS vaccine is exceedingly high, especially in Africa.

"This second vaccine holds real potential to close the huge demand-and-supply gap," said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa. "Delivered to scale and rolled out widely, the two vaccines can help bolster malaria prevention and control efforts and save hundreds of thousands of young lives in Africa from this deadly disease.”

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The WHO estimates that there were 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021, with an estimated 619,000 deaths. Disruptions in the public health system due to the COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to 63,000 more deaths and 13 million more cases of malaria, according to WHO estimates.

Approximately 3 in 4 malaria deaths are of children under the age of 5.