Strep A Vaccine Fund
A Vaccine Could End This. Fund It.
Strep A kills roughly 639,000 people a year and there has never been a licensed vaccine to stop it.
Deaths per year from Strep A
Live counter
Estimated so far this year.
The evidence
A Death Toll That Rivals HIV and Malaria
Group A Streptococcus is responsible for an estimated 639,000 deaths every year, a toll comparable to HIV/AIDS and malaria (Open Philanthropy, 2025), yet it receives a small fraction of the research funding.
Rheumatic Heart Disease Is the Real Killer
Most Strep A deaths trace back to rheumatic heart disease, where the body's immune response to repeated untreated infections scars the heart valves. Roughly 300,000 people die from it each year and an estimated 55 million live with it worldwide (NEJM; JAHA, GBD 2019).
Eliminated for the Rich, Fatal for the Poor
Rheumatic heart disease has been virtually eliminated in wealthy countries through routine penicillin access, but remains a leading killer of children and young adults across sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are up to 55 times more likely to die of the disease (NACCHO).
A Century of False Starts
Adverse events in early human trials triggered a roughly 30-year FDA-imposed ban on testing Strep A vaccines in people, and no candidate has been evaluated for efficacy in humans since the 1970s.
The Pipeline Is Finally Moving
Eight vaccine candidates are now on a formal development track, with several approaching or entering clinical trials (npj Vaccines, 2023). New tools, including human challenge studies, are opening faster paths to proof of efficacy than ever before.
The Math on Waiting
Modeling shows a vaccine delivered at birth across 30 vaccinated cohorts could avert roughly 2.5 billion episodes of pharyngitis and 6 million cases of rheumatic heart disease globally. Yet the Strep A Vaccine Fund has raised just over $140 million toward its $200 million goal.
What we can do
Phase 1 is closing the funding gap, fully capitalizing the $200 million Strep A Vaccine Fund so the most advanced candidates can complete clinical trials instead of stalling for lack of cash. Phase 2 is investing in next-generation platforms and in-region manufacturing so low- and middle-income countries are not left waiting a decade after approval. Phase 3 is securing WHO prequalification and prioritizing rollout to the highest-burden populations first.
Sources: Open Philanthropy, Wellcome Trust, Strep A Vaccine Global Consortium, World Health Organization, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Heart Association, npj Vaccines, NACCHO
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