New vaccine for Ebola proving 100% effective
In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experiment al Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease.
The vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority, but it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has been created for use should an outbreak flare up again.
Since Ebola was discovered in the former Zaire in 1976, there have been many efforts to create a vaccine. All began with a sense of urgency but then petered out for lack of money. Although only about 1,600 people died of Ebola over those years, the grotesque nature of their deaths — copious hemorrhaging from every orifice — has lent the disease a frightening reputation.
Ultimately, only the huge, explosive 2014 outbreak that took 11,000 lives in Africa and spread overseas, killing a handful of people in Europe and the United States, provided the political and economic drive to make an effective vaccine.
The test results of the trial in Guinea were rele ased Thursday in The Lancet.
The vaccine was not ready in time to stop the outbreak, which probably began in a hollow, bat-filled tree in Guinea and swept Liberia and Guinea before being defeated. But the prospect of a vaccine stockpile has brought optimism among public health experts.
“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation and the study’s lead author. “The world c an’t afford the confusion and human disaster that came with the last epidemic.”
The vaccine opens up new, faster, more efficient ways to encircle and strangle the virus. The many small Ebola outbreaks that occurred between 1976 and 2014 were all stopped in remote villages by laborious methods: medical teams flew in, isolated the sick, and donned protective gear to treat them and bury the dead.
But that tactic failed in 2014 when the virus reached crowded capital cities, where it spread like wildfire and dead bodies piled up in the streets.
The new vaccine has some flaws, experts said. It appears to work against only one of the two most common strains of the Ebola virus, and it may not give long-lasting protection.
“It’s certainly good news with regard to any new outbreak — and one will occur s o m e w h e r e , ” s a i d D r. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “But we still need to continue working on Ebola vaccines.”
The Lancet study was done in 11,841 residents of Guinea last year. Among the 5,837 people who got the vaccine, none came down with Ebola 10 or more days later.