In that environment, you'd expect child mortality to go down year by year, regardless of this vaccine.
Maybe the study corrects for that, but the complete absence of details in this report isn't promising.
> To calculate mortality in the three countries, where death registry statistics are unreliable, the researchers employed tens of thousands of community reporters—more than 14,000 of them in Kenya alone—to conduct household surveys of childhood deaths in 79 areas where the RTS,S vaccine was administered and 79 comparator areas where it was not available.
If the group that got the vaccine has a 13% lower all cause mortality than the group that didn’t, and it was your standard randomized controlled double blind study, that’s a huge win.
We don't have the actual report yet: just reporting on it being presented at a conference. I have not found it in indexes yet, but hopefully soon.
> Maybe the study corrects for that
Yes: the article we're reading makes it clear that it's comparing like-communities where there was and was not vaccine rollout, not looking at time series data.
I apologize for any inconvenience!
If you have not read it, Factfullness by Hans Rosling is incredible.