“The lessons of history should give us pause,” writes the medical historian W.F. Bynum in a long piece about malaria vaccines in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.
The occasion for Bynum’s piece is the publication of an optimistic new book about malaria vaccines, written by the entrepreneur-philanthropist Bill Shore, with the somewhat nauseating title of “The
Imaginations of Unreasonable Men: Inspiration, Vision, and Purpose in the Quest to End Malaria.” (I’m no strident stickler for gender-neutral language, but really? Unreasonable men? In the TITLE? Take that, Melinda Gates and Regina Rabinovich.)
Shore’s book is an homage to the charitable work of Bill and Melinda Gates, giving “upbeat profiles” of Gates Foundation beneficiaries, as Bynum puts it. Bynum tackles the question as to whether their quest to develop a malaria vaccine is really the be-all end-all of malaria. “Most malariologists agree that malaria cannot be eliminated without a vaccine,” he writes. “But that does not mean that a vaccine will necessarily eliminate malaria.” Quite.
It’s a great piece. (And not only for this: “All these issues, and many others, are brilliantly exposed in Ms. Shah’s book.”)
