WHO preparing for mass Ebola vaccinations early next year

UN health body hopes to use two vaccines currently at experimental stage, with five others also in development.

Cleaning crews prepare to work at the building where Dr Craig Spencer lives in New York, a day after he tested positive for the Ebola virus. Brendan McDermid / Reuters / October 24, 2014

GENEVA // Millions of doses of two experimental Ebola vaccines could be ready for use by next year and five more experimental vaccines will start being tested in March, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, after new cases of the killer virus were reported in New York and Mali.

Marie-Paule Kieny from the UN health agency said the doses could be available in 2015 if early tests proved that the two leading experimental vaccines are safe and provoke enough of an immune response to protect people from being infected by the virus that has already killed more than 4,800 people this year in West Africa.

Trials of those two most advanced vaccines –one developed by GlaxoSmithKline in cooperation with the US National Institutes of Health, the other developed by the Canadian Public Health Agency – have already begun in the US, UK and Mali.

“The vaccine is not the magic bullet. But when ready, they may be a good part of the effort to turn the tide of this epidemic,” said Dr Kieny.

If early data from the ongoing tests are promising, larger trials testing the vaccines in West Africa could begin as soon as December, Dr Kieny said; previously the trials were not to begin until January.

GSK said it might be able to make about 1 million doses of their vaccine per month by the end of 2015 if some logistical and regulatory hurdles could be overcome.

Dr Kieny said five other possible Ebola vaccines should start being tested in March, but gave no details about who is making them or where, or where those five vaccines would be tested.

There is currently no licensed cure for Ebola, which is transmitted through close contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or someone who has died from the disease.

Fears the haemorrhagic virus could spread further were stoked with confirmed cases in New York City and the west African nation of Mali, adding urgency to the hunt for a cure.

New York confirmed the city’s first case of Ebola on Thursday, with a doctor testing positive after returning from treating patients in Guinea, the origin of the current outbreak of the disease.

Craig Spencer was placed in isolation at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital Center, officials said.

With health workers in Spain and Texas already having caught Ebola from patients originally infected in west Africa, New York mayor Bill de Blasio insisted the city was fully prepared to stop the disease in its tracks.

“We want to state at the outset, [this] is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed. Ebola is an extremely hard disease to contract.”

The New York governor Andrew Cuomo said city officials had already identified four people believed to have had contact with the doctor, who worked for the charity Doctors Without Borders.

He said he did not expect a repeat of the situation in Dallas, where two nurses were infected after treating an Ebola patient who died on October 8.

Both of the nurses was declared free of the virus on Friday.

In Mali, health authorities are monitoring at least 43 people who had contact with a toddler declared the country’s first Ebola case, the WHO said.

“As soon as the case was confirmed, local authorities began tracing everyone who had contact with the little girl and her grandmother,” spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said.

“Around 43 contacts are being monitored. Ten are health workers, including those who dealt with the girl at a paediatric clinic.”

Mali’s health ministry announced on Thursday that the two-year-old girl had tested positive for Ebola.

It said the girl and her grandmother had visited Kissidougou, a town in the southern part of Guinea.

In an indication of how the rising spread of Ebola is upending many attempts to halt this year’s outbreak, Dr Kieny said plans were changing “week to week” as governments, health agencies and donor countries tried to speed up efforts to fight the deadly virus.

She said some details about getting the vaccines to West Africa had yet to be worked out, including who would pay for immunisation campaigns – which were not planned to start before June at the earliest. Doctors Without Borders has pledged to create a vaccine fund and other organisations, including the World Bank, might help buy the vaccines, she said.

She also acknowledged that, given the speed at which these experimental vaccines are being rolled out, “there will certainly not be as much known in terms of their safety as would be normal.”

Dr Kieny said Britain had proposed creating a fund that would offload liability from pharmaceutical companies in case any bad side effects emerge from the shots.

In Brussels on Friday, the 28-member European Union managed to create a €1 billion (Dh4.65bn) fund to fight the Ebola outbreak.

“Helping West Africa to cope with the crisis is the most effective way to prevent a serious outbreak of the disease elsewhere,” the EU leaders said at the end of a two-day summit.

“The scale of the epidemic is a threat not only to the economy and the stability of the affected countries, but also to the region as a whole. “

In Beijing, China’s president pledged to provide $81 million in aid to help fight Ebola.

* Associated Press and Agence France-Presse