A few years ago I found myself chatting to a guy who had worked as a software engineer-turned malarial epidemiologist at a well known UK university. He told me he had "run away screaming" from that field and switched a different one because he was so shocked by what he saw in the field of malaria research.

As he explained it, the big problem is the field's dependence on funding from the Gates Foundation. Philanthropic funding isn't bad per se but the issue is that Gates specifically wants a legacy. That means he's not really interested in funding mitigation, he's only interested in eradication. A lot of researchers in the field think eradication isn't practical, but they keep their views private because you have to be gung-ho about eradication if you want access to the BMG Foundation funding stream. He said the result is a lot of grant proposals that are deliberately either vague or deceptive so money intended for eradication efforts can get spent on more useful stuff.

Beyond creating a culture where researchers routinely misrepresent their work and views, he told me the bigger problem was that it caused them to take extreme risks. Prototypical example: blanket spray an area with anti-malarial drugs. If it works then hooray, you eradicated malaria from that area. Until it returns, that is. But if it doesn't work then you just bred a new strain of malaria that's resistant to all known medications. It's the same problem as over-use of antibiotics.

A malaria vaccine delivered by mosquito sounds like the exact problem he was talking about, except times a million. One problem that can occur with vaccines - that gets drowned out and censored by the public health lobby and its allies - is that they can cause displacement rather than eradication. In other words you successfully vaccinate against one strain of the pathogen, but then it mutates under selection pressure to dodge immune systems that are "overfitted" to the prior strain. When invaded by the new strain the body doesn't recognize quickly enough that its antibodies no longer dock correctly, and so it spends a lot of time creating those when it should be trying to find new antibodies instead.

This problem is sometimes called immune imprinting, OAS or some other names and it's especially nasty because it misleads researchers doing drug trials. They develop a very targeted test against a pathogen (PCR or so), they make a vaccine against it, they vaccinate a trial population, the test drops to zero so they roll it out to the wider population. Success! Except then some years later some assholes point out that mortality didn't actually drop in that targeted population. All that happened is the pathogen mutated to the point neither the test nor the immune system recognize it, and so people are just getting sick with the variant instead. Unfortunately, awareness of this problem is very low because anyone who points it out is immediately targeted for cancellation and censorship for being an "anti-vaxxer" (they aren't anti-vaccine, they just want vaccines that are broad spectrum enough to actually achieve mortality reductions). Also public health institutions, having rolled out a vaccine, are loathe to admit in public it was all for nothing as they fear that it would lower compliance in future campaigns.

All this is a long way of saying THIS IS BAD DON'T DO IT. The risk is real that it backfires in ways that break existing anti-malarial drugs, the funding situation creates strong incentives to ignore this risk, and there's a history of it happening and then being swept under the rug.