Name: We finally have an Ebola vaccine. And we’re using it in an outbreak.
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We finally have an Ebola vaccine. And we’re using it in an outbreak.

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In a first, the experimental vaccine is being deployed in the DRC to try to stop an outbreak from spreading.More than 680 doses of an have been given out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an of the deadly virus is ongoing.Merck’s rVSV-ZEBOV is the , and the 7,500 doses that have been sent to the DRC are expected to be an extremely useful tool in the , which so far involves .“This is the first time it’ll be used in a new outbreak,” said John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of the Research Council of Norway, who worked on the Ebola vaccine trials. “[Health officials] will vaccinate early on and hopefully before the epidemic takes off.”The news marks a rare public health success story involving a neglected disease, and it’s worth celebrating.Today marks a turning point in how we deal with – we are moving from a strategy of containment to one of offering communities protection and care — Peter Salama (@PeteSalama)The global community pours more money into than developing treatments or vaccines for like Ebola that affect more than a billion of the world’s poorest people. And when these scourges , it tends to come from budgets (remember, Ebola is considered a potential bioterrorism weapon).So it’s not all that surprising that while it’s been more than 40 years since Ebola’s discovery, in 1976, a vaccine to stop the virus from spreading remained elusive — until very recently.The 2013-’16 West Africa Ebola caused more than 11,000 deaths, but also sparked a focused on preventing the disease. The tragedy got the public and private sector galvanized around pushing an through the .Soon, the world will begin to see the results of that effort. Every previous Ebola outbreak has been snuffed out through a tried-and-true strategy called “contact tracing”: isolating those related to the sick before they had a chance to infect anyone else, and thus interrupting the human chain of transmission.This time, health officials also have a vaccine ready to use. (To date, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine’s clinical trials only involved people in outbreaks that had already been simmering for some time.)The WHO’s head of emergency response, Peter Salama, called it a “paradigm shift.” “It’s an important moment that changes the way we’ve seen Ebola for 40 years,” he told .According to the WHO, vaccines were donated by Merck, with the contributing $1 million toward operational costs. While there are more than 7,000 doses already in the DRC, with hundreds of thousands more.If the experimental vaccine works to prevent Ebola from spreading, it could mean major outbreaks involving Ebola’s Zaire strain, like the one we saw in West Africa a few years ago, will be a thing of the past.There are five species of Ebola, four of which have caused the disease in humans: Zaire, Sudan, Taï Forest, and Bundibugyo. (The fifth, Reston, was discovered in Virginia and has infected only monkeys.) The rVSV-ZEBOV was designed to protect against Zaire, .But it doesn’t actually contain deadly Ebola virus — it , vesicular stomatitis, with a gene encoding an Ebola virus surface protein to trick the body’s immune system.Created by the Public Health Agency of Canada in 2003, the vaccine was in monkeys. But because of a lack of pharmaceutical company interest before the West Africa outbreak, it until it was licensed to Merck in 2014.During the West Africa outbreak, researchers — from the World Health Organization, Guinea’s Ministry of Health, Public Health England, and other international partners — worked together to help set up a clinical trial to test the vaccine. In 2015, they published striking preliminary results in the showing that everyone who got the shot immediately after contact with an Ebola victim didn’t get the virus.A year later, they unveiled , also in the Lancet, and they were just as amazing. The vaccine was tested in nearly 12,000 people in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Among the 5,837 people who got the vaccine, no Ebola cases were recorded. By comparison, there were 23 cases in the control group that had not gotten the vaccine.”This trial, confirming the 100 percent efficacy of the rVSV Ebola vaccine, is a simply remarkable outcome,” Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said when the results came out. “We’ve shown that by working collaboratively, across international borders and sectors, we can develop and test vaccines rapidly and use them to help bring epidemics to an end.”The surge of interest in Ebola helped spur the development of a new organization called , the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Funded by nearly half a billion dollars from the UK’s Wellcome Trust, the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, and the governments of Germany, Japan, and Norway, the organization focuses on readying vaccines for the next likely pandemic.CEPI has been working with Merck to push the Ebola vaccine through clinical trials, though it’s still not yet commercially available. In 2016, to stockpile doses of the vaccine, and helped fund Merck’s regulatory effort. To date, health officials have never been able to deploy the vaccine quickly enough at the start of an outbreak. Just last year, an ended before the vaccine needed to be given out.This time is different. At the , the vaccine is having its first early field test at the outbreak’s epicenter in Bikoro, in the country’s northwest Équateur province. Later this week, it will be deployed in Iboko health zone, the most remote of the three areas with confirmed cases, WHO.Bikoro is in a very remote area of a country that has poor road infrastructure, but it’s situated on a lake connecting the highly trafficked Congo and Ubangi rivers. People infected with Ebola there hop — a potential public health nightmare officials are trying to prevent quickly. (Four confirmed cases have already popped up in Mbandaka, an was first identified in Bikoro.)Last year, the DRC government already approved a clinical trial protocol for the vaccine, according to Jon Cohen at . Because the vaccine is still considered experimental, it will be given out to volunteers on the grounds ofDoctors Without Borders, the WHO, and Gavi, with the DRC’s health ministry in the lead, will collaborate on the vaccine program (including keeping the shots stored at cold temperatures — minus 76 to minus 112 Fahrenheit — that protect its effectiveness).“This is not a simple logistical effort,” Salama said in a May 11. “It’s not like doing a polio campaign with oral polio vaccines where we get it immediately out to the field. This is a highly complex, sophisticated operation in one of the most difficult terrains on earth.”One of the most fascinating things about the vaccine, beyond its apparent safety and effectiveness, is how it’ll be used. Health officials will employ something called “ring vaccination,” an approach used to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. It involves immunizing the contacts — friends, family, housemates, neighbors — of a person who falls ill with a virus to create a protective ring around them to stop transmission. In the DRC, health workers and other Ebola responders will also be vaccinated.As soon as a new Ebola case is diagnosed, health workers will trace the person’s contacts and then vaccinate them to prevent anyone else from falling ill. Those people will be followed up for 84 days, the , to see whether Ebola or any side effects develop.Having the vaccine “doesn’t mean we don’t need to do all those other measures that are standard to an Ebola response,” said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic. “Having treatment centers, active case finding, contact tracing, having safe and dignified burials, having lab capacity.”So the vaccine is an exciting new technology — a potentially lifesaving one — but its success will hinge on decades-old public health strategies.Millions turn to Vox to understand what’s happening in the news. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.Understand how policy impacts people. Delivered Fridays.

In a first, the experimental vaccine is being deployed in the DRC to try to stop an outbreak from spreading.More than 680 doses of an have been given out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an of the deadly virus is ongoing.Merck’s rVSV-ZEBOV is the , and the 7,500 doses that have been sent to the DRC are expected to be an extremely useful tool in the , which so far involves .“This is the first time it’ll be used in a new outbreak,” said John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of the Research Council of Norway, who worked on the Ebola vaccine trials. “[Health officials] will vaccinate...

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Health journalist working on a book about nutrition, metabolism and, obesity. Formerly @voxdotcom, @MIT Knight Fellow etc  Mastodon @juliaoftoronto@masto.ai

Julia Belluz

Vox is a liberal-leaning American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in April 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell, and is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism. Vox's media presence also includes a YouTube channel, several podcasts, and a show presented on Netflix.

We finally have an Ebola vaccine. And we’re using it in an outbreak.

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