Hope and doubt over Ebola jab
World waits to see if promising vaccine can halt terrifying disease
MBANDAKA
(Congo): Irene Mboyo Mola spent 11 days caring for her husband as he died of Ebola in a hospital where she said nurses were too scared to get close. She helped him to the bathroom, picked up his feverish body when he lost his balance, and reinserted an IV that fell out of his bleeding arm.
“He told me all he could see was death,” recalls Mola, a 30-year-old mother of six, as she sat slumped on the floor in her small hut.
That close contact put Mola at risk of getting a disease that has no cure and kills about half of those infected. But now, as Congo battles the most serious Ebola outbreak since the devastating 2014 epidemic in West Africa, health workers have something new to offer: a vaccine.
With thousands of doses dispatched to front-line health workers, the world is watching to see if a promising but still experimental vaccine might help stop this terrifying disease faster than traditional measures doctors have tried since Ebola was identified 40 years ago.
Even if the vaccine helps, there are serious hurdles. The shots must be transported deep into forests with few paved roads without it spoiling in the heat.
Health workers have to identify and track down anyone who’s had contact with a sick person. Hardest of all, they must persuade a wary population that shots pushed by foreigners could save their lives.
“Communities must be at the centre of the response if the activities are going to be effective,” said Jonathan Polonsky of the World Health Organisation, a surveillance coordinator in Mbandaka, a city of more than one million in north-western Congo.
Mola’s six children have all been vaccinated. But she refused, telling government social workers and WHO workers that she didn’t believe her husband died from Ebola. She said the hospital never showed her records confirming he’d tested positive for the virus.
There’s no guarantee the vaccine will help stop the outbreak. But Congo’s health ministry and the WHO rushed in 7,500 doses, created by the Public Health Agency of Canada and owned by Merck.
It was deemed the best option because the vaccine was found highly promising in testing a few years ago, when the epidemic in West Africa, which killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016, was starting to wane.
The plan: What’s called “ring vaccination”, to find and vaccinate everyone who’s had direct contact with a sick person – the first “ring” – and then contacts of those people, too, to break the chain of infection.