Ebola Vaccine Is Already Saving Lives

Researchers have developed an Ebola vaccine which provides 100 percent protection against one particularly risky strain of the disease, based on final field tests on thousands of people in West Africa.

World Health Organization representatives are excited about the possibilities of such significant results, but that excitement is tempered by the memories of the deadly 2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

No Ebola cases were recorded 10 days or more after vaccination was introduced among the almost 6,000 people, who received the vaccine. No vaccine recipient got sick with Ebola between six and 84 days after vaccination, let alone died from the disease.

It’s not a surprise – researchers had been working on an Ebola vaccine for years but because the virus only usually caused occasional, small outbreaks, it was hard to test it.

An emergency 300,000 doses of the vaccine are at the ready should another outbreak strike before then, the Times reported.

Merck’s rVSV-EBOV has already been used in Sierra Leone to contain a flare-up there.

While Beijing scientists made solid ground, it was researchers in Norway who today published the results of their 11,800-strong trial in Guinea – where not one inoculated person contracted the disease.

World Health Organization assistant director-general Marie-Paule Kieny wrote in the medical journal “The Lancet” that an “effective vaccine” for Ebola, dubbed rVSV-ZEBOV should be 80 percent effective in a fully-fledged epidemic.

Ira Logini, the biostatistician who worked on this trial project said that “we were able to estimate the exact efficacy of vaccine and it is being 100 % in the Guinea trial”.

“Ebola left a devastating legacy in our country”, says Director of the National Agency for Health Security in Guinea, KeÏta Sakoba. It involved vaccinating all people who may have come in contact with that particular case within the previous three weeks – friends, family and other visitors.

The final results from a large trial of a promising Ebola vaccine in Guinea, confirm that it provides a high level of protection against the disease. In the other group, which included those who got a delayed vaccination as well as those who were never vaccinated, there were 23 cases.

It is not known how well the vaccine might work in children since this was not tested in the trial.

“At this stage the producer Merck is preparing a dossier to submit for registration, because what we need in the end is a vaccine which can be used without a trial, without a study“.

It was carried out past year at the tail end of western Africa’s epidemic that began in early 2014 and also spanned Liberia and Sierra Leone, prompting world alarm.

Some people who had the vaccine reported headaches, fatigue and muscle pain.