Ebola experimental vaccine is highly effective, trial shows

The results were so effective that 300 thousand doses were already produced although the vaccine has not been approved by any regulatory agency, yet.

Ebola is a viral hemorrhagic fever transmitted by the Ebola viruses. A tragedy had to take place to raise awareness about the condition. A deadly outbreak in West Africa in the latter part of 2014 led to 11,000 gruesome deaths, and vaccination efforts went into overdrive.

“When Ebola strikes again we will be in a much better position to offer help to affected communities, as well as protect the courageous volunteers who help control this awful disease”, he said in an emailed statement.

Guinea, along with Liberia and Sierra Leone, was one of the worst affected countries.

The trial, called “Ebola ça Suffit” – French for “Ebola that’s enough” – was led by the WHO, Guinea’s Ministry of Health, Medecins sans Frontieres, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, as well as other worldwide partners.

The manufacturer received a Breakthrough Therapy Designation from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and PRIME status from the European Medicines Agency.

Although the results are recent, the vaccine was developed over a decade ago. The results of this trial were released in The Lancet on Thursday. A total of 11,841 participated, 5,837 of whom received the vaccine.

According to the report, vaccinating only 52.1 percent of the participants was still 70.1 percent effective in preventing the spread of Ebola.

The researchers tracked down every person who may have been in contact with a case, including family members and friends.

The trial also shows that unvaccinated people in the rings were indirectly protected from Ebola virus using this approach, commonly referred to as herd immunity. It is made of a vesicular stomatitis virus – a disease that sickens cattle but does not typically infect humans – spliced with the gene coding of an Ebola virus surface protein that causes the immune system to create antibodies. Ten days or more later, no Ebola cases were recorded in the group. It’s now being developed and manufactured by Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. But hopefully news of a successful vaccine subsides that fear on the off chance that there’s another outbreak – in another USA city. Of course, 100% seems a bit extreme, but NPR notes that by comparison, the flu vaccine was approximately 50% effective as recently as previous year.

“Vaccine efficacy was 100 per cent”, the scientists behind the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine wrote in their paper.

Thomas Monath, NewLink’s chief scientific officer for infectious diseases, said the vaccine’s success should mean the world will never see another widespread Ebola epidemic.