Malaria Vaccine Research Help Needed

By joshcmorrison, rduncombe @ 2023-12-29T17:05 (+41)

We at 1Day Sooner posted recently about scoping a campaign to push for an accelerated rollout of the newly approved R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine. The vaccine was recently prequalified by the WHO, a key step on the critical path to vaccine distribution, but much remains to be done. 

We greatly appreciate the more than a dozen people who reached out to help after our last post. Their work was invaluable for producing our December Malaria Vaccination Status Report, the development of which has been critical to improving our understanding of the problem. Our colleague Zacharia Kafuko's op-ed as well as Peter Singer's on the subject are also both good sources for further reading.

We plan to publish a new status report every month and maintain a rolling public comment version to reflect our latest understanding of the issue and use as a sort of global workspace to share the most critical information about obstacles and enablers for widespread distribution. To make our research work for this more sustainable we're moving to a pool system where members sign up for at least four days out of the month where they will be assigned a 1-2.5 hour research or writing task to update and improve our status report document. Pool members will be paid $100 per pool day. (Here is a punch list of the type of goals we have for our next draft. Further details on the pool structure can be found here.). 

We are looking to add 5-10 new pool members for January beyond those who signed up last month. If you're interested in helping, please fill out the google form linked here [edit: we have received a large amount of interest and are pausing sign ups for the moment].

Questions and comments are very welcome. Thanks!

 

 


 

MaithGopalan @ 2024-01-04T18:03 (+2)

This sounds like a great project! I am not sure if the Op-Ed venues have already been finalized. But I wanted to flag this as a possible venue for an op-ed/policy brief-type entry as FAS seems to have a lot of federal policymakers as their audience - https://fas.org/accelerator/innovations-for-global-development/ Also, this particular idea page might have USAID, USDA, etc. as the audience, not sure if that's a good target but just wanted to flag it.

JoshuaBlake @ 2023-12-29T22:29 (+2)

What's the timeline you're after for firm committal? I might be interested but need to prioritise what I'm do long over the next 2-3 months so would not be able to commit immediately.

joshcmorrison @ 2023-12-29T22:43 (+2)

A month at a time so just January at this point

JoshuaBlake @ 2023-12-30T07:50 (+2)

OK, I can't commit right now, but I'll look out for if you're advertising again for February (or feel free to get in touch with me). Good luck, great project!

Mitchell Laughlin @ 2024-01-03T10:27 (+1)

Hi Josh, apologies if this was detailed elsewhere, but do you have any skills you're after for pool members? I'd be keen to help out if you thought I could. 

joshcmorrison @ 2024-01-03T14:39 (+3)

Thanks for your interest! I've copied a description of the pool work below to give a better sense, but basically it's mostly research tasks that are like "research how vaccine distribution (not purchasing doses) is normally funded for new vaccines and write a 3-5 paragraph summary)" or "take a 3-5 paragraph summary someone wrote and create 3-6 sentences of suggested text to include in the status report" or "cite-check a section of talking points to make sure all the facts mentioned have citations and that those citations actually support the facts." 

Overall, we're very much in a "more the merrier" stage and would love your help. 

Here are more details on the scheme:

 

Plan for a Pool System to Handle Research/Talking Points 


 

Our talking points are intended to be a live, continually updated document representing our best understanding of malaria vaccination and how to improve rollout. In a sense it is intended to be a “global workspace” for our campaign thinking, where new research on key questions is inputted and accurate and relevant information about vaccination is shared across the campaign. Stylistically the talking points are intended to emphasize brevity, simplicity, and ease of use by a general audience.


 

To create a manageable process to continually update and improve the document (i.e. by executing this rolling punch list of tasks), we propose a pool system where volunteers sign up for a five days per month where they are “on-call” and will be assigned a 1-2.5 hour task per day, with assignments going out the night before and due the following morning (e.g. a Monday pool task would go out Sunday night and be due Tuesday morning). The expectation would be pool members would ideally sign up for two 2-day blocks and one 1-day block in a month or 3-day and 2-day blocks. The blocks are so that larger tasks (3-5 hours) can be assigned over a two day period. 

 

We’d aim to have at least eight pool members and one pool manager.