Is such an invasive method even needed? Malaria deaths are down by almost 50% in the period of 2000-2015 according to WHO data.
It is cost effective and also implies that you can do other things along the same lines. For example, you could do the same thing to Aedes aegypti (another mosquito species that carries thinks like Zika and Yellow Fever). You might be able to do it to bot flies. Lone Star Ticks. Or many others.
It's a never ending cascade of special eradication. Today, ticks and mosquitoes carrying life threatening agents. Tomorrow, perhaps rats, cats, mice, sparrows, bed bugs, termites, and any other organism that we find inconvenient? How about certain kinds of humans, perhaps we can terminate people that are cognitively impaired? Wielding the rod of genocide seems like a poor choice.
The gene drive requires sexual reproduction to spread and produce sterile mosquitoes.
Huh, maybe this will open an opportunity for sex-non-obligate mosquitoes infected by Wolbachia, if those are even produced by their interaction
Excerpt taken from https://ourworldindata.org/malaria#bed-nets .
Furthermore only 30% of the population is sleeping under a bed net already in sub-Saharan Africa as mentioned bit further down in the same article. So there's still room for improvements.