Malaria kills more than a thousand children every day. Measures like antimalarial medications and insecticide-treated bed nets, which stop infected mosquitoes from transmitting the disease-causing parasite to people while they sleep, have saved millions of lives at a relatively low cost. Yet despite these interventions, which reduced mortality by about 29 percent, over 430,000 children died from malaria last year. With the recent approval of two new malaria vaccines, RTS,S and R21, we have the opportunity to make another leap in the fight to eradicate malaria.

Malaria can be deadly for people of all ages, but it’s especially life-threatening for young kids: Over 75 percent of malaria deaths happen in children under 5. For now, malaria-endemic countries — like Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) — are focusing vaccination efforts on infants, who are already brought into clinics for routine shots anyway. Over the past year, 10.2 million doses were delivered to children across 17 countries. (So far, neither vaccine is approved for adults.)

The shots are largely paid for by Gavi, an international organization that uses donations from rich governments and philanthropies to subsidize lifesaving vaccine rollouts in countries with a gross national income per capita below $1,810 — about 2 percent that of the United States.

Last summer, Gavi announced its goal to raise $9 billion to fund immunizations from 2026 to 2030, with over $1.1 billion of those funds earmarked for new malaria vaccines. That’s enough to save around 180,000 children’s lives over the next five years.

But we could theoretically save many more.

A new paper by the Center for Global Development (CGD) estimates that 800,000 more child deaths could be avoided between now and 2030 — if Gavi buys and distributes as many vaccines as manufacturers can make. Though manufacturers say they have over 100 million doses ready to go, Gavi’s plan would buy only a fraction of them. To buy all of the currently available doses and put them into the field now, Gavi would need to triple its $1.4 billion malaria vaccine budget.

CGD’s proposed strategy — to buy and distribute as many doses as possible today, and trust that manufacturers will replenish their supply quickly — goes against conventional wisdom about vaccine rollouts. Gavi’s current strategy is to gradually ramp up R21 vaccinations, prioritizing the most vulnerable children first, while only distributing as many doses as can be stably purchased in the long run. By doing so, Gavi hopes to balance the urgent need to save lives with the importance of maintaining a sustainable vaccine supply. This is how most vaccines are introduced, including the

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