NPR: Ebola researchers push for “innovative” approach to distributing vaccine

The World Health Organization just finished up a two-day meeting to debate whether they should […]

The World Health Organization just finished up a two-day meeting to debate whether they should allow an Ebola vaccine to be administered in the field without having tested efficacy, NPR reports.

The disease’s spread is alarming, and traditional containment methods like isolation just aren’t working well enough. But while an untested Ebola vaccine given to volunteers could potentially contain the epidemic, there’s also a chance it could put people at even greater a risk to contract the disease. NPR says:

Dr. Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford, says the urgency of the Ebola situation has led to throwing traditional timelines “out the window.”

He’s part of a team of doctors at Oxford University, the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, who are rushing to create one of several new Ebola vaccines.

Hill says their vaccine could be ready to give to healthcare workers as early as late November. That would be an extremely fast pace compared to the typical timeline for developing a new vaccine.

Vaccine development timelines for population-wide administration are pretty conservative, after all. GlaxoSmithKline’s been taking 31 years to develop a malaria vaccine, though most others take five to ten years. Vaccine trials begin with incremental doses and steadily monitor a small test group over a long period of time. In this case, however, things would be much fast-forwarded. NPR says:

Ebola researchers at the NIH, Oxford and GlaxoSmithKline are compressing those steps to meet the November deadline. They plan to look at volunteers’ blood for antibodies they know are protective against Ebola. But before vaccinated people come into contact with the disease, developers can’t know for sure that the vaccine works.

This is particularly problematic, because in some cases a vaccine is initially deemed safe, but dangerous pathologies later emerge. For instance, an HIV/AIDS vaccine recently found that it actually increased the risk of contracting the virus.

“If you did it in the way where you never could tell whether it worked well, worked a little, didn’t work at all, or actually made people worse … you could actually propagate a disaster,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR.

The World Health Organization will announce the outcome of its meeting on Wednesday.

Shares0
Shares0