Bloomberg
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Ebola Shot Turned Down by WHO Is Best Hope as Virus Rages
By Makiko Kitamura and Shannon Pettypiece Sep 26, 2014 5:30 AM ET
The calls started coming in August to the office of GlaxoSmithKline Plc Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty from the head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan. The Ebola outbreak was raging out of control and Chan needed the drugmaker’s vaccine as quickly as possible.
The sudden sense of urgency for an Ebola vaccine was an about face from a few months earlier when Glaxo contacted the WHO, asking whether its vaccine could help with the outbreak. At that time, the company was told the focus was on containment and the WHO didn’t have a policy for using vaccines in this type of situation. “We’ll get back to you” was the message, said Ripley Ballou, head of Glaxo’s Ebola vaccine program.
As those months passed and containment efforts failed, the epidemic spun out of control, claiming more lives than all past outbreaks combined. So far, more than 6,200 people have been infected and 2,900 have died, and the virus could sicken more than 1.4 million people by January under the worst-case scenario projected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With no approved Ebola medicines, and experimental treatments in short supply, a vaccine is now one of the best hopes for halting the virus’s spread before it becomes entrenched in the region. That puts pressure on the few drugmakers with a vaccine in development as they shift resources, delay other projects, and spend millions in a race to immunize patients. Glaxo and Johnson & Johnson are preparing thousands of doses of their experimental vaccines to test in Africa as early as January.
Traditional Measures
“It may be that without a vaccine we can’t really stop this epidemic,” Peter Piot, a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus in 1976 who is now the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said at a news conference in London this week.
When Glaxo contacted the WHO in March, the vaccine was seen as a “diversion of energy” at a time when it was believed the outbreak would be controlled with traditional measures, such as contact tracing and safe burials, that have helped contain every previous outbreak, said Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation. At the end of March, there were about 100 cases of Ebola in Guinea, with early reports the virus was spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We were in a situation where GSK had a vaccine which had been tested in animals, and that was it,” Kieny said in a telephone interview. “It was only then when the situation started to be quite worse, and people understood that we’re not going to make it, that the effort came to a higher level.”…
vaccines and global health :: ethics and policy 