I'm tapping the brakes on my enthusiasm here. It's great that they got this far, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Setting aside the fact that it doesn't cover everyone (between 30% and 40% effective, depending) there are a few things that stood out:

The clinical trials also found that meningitis occurred more frequently in children given the vaccine.

Meningitis isn't small cookies: it's when the meninges (an inflexible membrane that encases the brain, just inside the skull) becomes inflamed, causing pressure on the brain. You wind up with a lot of symptoms that are similar to a stroke or brain injury, and you can wind up with lifelong cognitive deficits if it's not treated properly -- outright dead if treatment is delayed. Never a good thing. Inside the skull is just enough room for the brain, no more than that, so on the good/bad scale, this is bad.

"Because the vaccine's efficacy is so short-lived, as expected a booster dose is shown to be of some value - but it was not as effective at the initial doses.

So you get your first pop, it wears off, but you never get the same protection from any subsequent pops. Over time, this will be addressed in v. 2.0, etc. but we need to remember that current risk mitigation strategies (netting, etc) must continue.

"More worrying is the new evidence of a rebound in malaria susceptibility: after 20 months, vaccinated children who were not boosted showed an increased risk of severe malaria over the next 27 months compared to non-vaccinated controls."

Kiddos get a pop, which protects them for a little over a year and a half, but then they're even more susceptible to malaria. No bueno. Again, efforts to distribute nets and control mosquito populations need to continue. And there's still the whole meningitis susceptibility to remain vigilant against.

Overall, he said the vaccine's potential public health benefits were not yet clear.

Regrettably, the way you figure this one out is to field the vaccine, for better or worse. I think it will benefit some populations, but it won't be a panacea.

"It should be possible to make the vaccine more effective in some settings, but that will probably increase delivery costs substantially."

This one's a problem. Africa is huge. How huge? Take the US, China, India, Mexico, Europe, and Japan. They'd all fit together within Africa's hulking land mass. A lot of people don't realize that delivering anything in Africa is hard, so the slightest thing that affects delivery of a vaccine suddenly becomes a big deal. (It's probably easier to get something delivered to McMurdo Base on Antarctica in the middle of winter, compared to some places in Africa.)

TL;DR: This is a big step forward, but it's not without significant risks, and it still requires doubling down on current anti-malarial strategies. This is very much v1.0 of future vaccines, so further research is crucial.