Introducing a Malaria vaccine into a vaccine hesitant world.

In a changed COVID-19 world, vaccinations have become part of infodemics, geopolitics, and global conspiracy theories, requiring active trust and decision-making rather than implicit or unconditional acceptance. Vaccine hesitancy will therefore present one of the main challenges for the effective roll-out of any malaria vaccine. Public health authorities and healthcare services face
a considerable challenge of embedding an effective intervention in the local social and cultural context and in finding effective ways to engage in a constructive dialogue about the concerns that can undermine confidence in malaria vaccines. This jPPP proposes a transdisciplinary mixedmethods
social science study, combining qualitative ethnographic work, survey research and social participation strategies in Burkina Faso – ancillary to the R21 VAC78 trial ‘A Phase III Randomized Controlled Multi-centre Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy of the R21/Matrix-M Vaccine in African Children Against Clinical Malaria’. Our long-term objective is to develop an intervention strategy,
co-created with stakeholders and embedded in national and regional COVID-19 responses, to mitigate the anticipated malaria vaccine hesitancy and use the results of the jPPP study to prepare a larger proposal addressing malaria vaccine hesitancy.