When I was in college I had a Zoology professor who mentioned, on multiple occasions, that Malaria had killed '50% of all humans since man's inception".
In fact, on 2 different exams, we had to draw the lifecycle of the genus plasmodium (the thing that causes malaria). Crazy.
Mosquitos are why I will never visit Finland in the summer again! Horrid little fuckheads. Maybe one day we can engineer them to exist without eating humans.
Even before quinine the death rate after infection was around 10%, and the majority of people who ever lived did not catch malaria (although not by a huge margin).
That's great news! One upside of Covid is that it increased funding toward vaccine development strategies. Hopefully we'll get even more effective vaccines for other hard to treat diseases.