There is no vaccine for malaria
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtMalaria kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, most of them young children, and there is no vaccine against it. The parasite is too complex and shape-shifting a target; a century of attempts had produced nothing usable.
NowIn October 2021, the World Health Organization recommended the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S (Mosquirix), for widespread use in children across sub-Saharan Africa, the first vaccine ever recommended against a human parasitic disease.
What actually happened
A vaccine against a parasite is genuinely harder than one against a virus or bacterium, because the malaria parasite is a moving target with a multi-stage life cycle. That is why RTS,S took decades and why its recommendation was historic rather than routine.
The honest scope belongs on the card: RTS,S is only modestly effective (it prevents roughly four in ten malaria cases) and needs four doses. But 'modest against malaria' still means many thousands of children's lives, and it broke the categorical wall. A second, more effective vaccine, R21, followed within two years. The flat sentence taught for a century, that there is no malaria vaccine, is no longer true.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2021, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2021 learned the earlier version.