New Ebola Vaccine to be Tested on 500,000 Congolese

The race for an Ebola Vaccine begun several years ago when Ebola was allegedly spreading through parts of the World like wildfire. Since this scare the media panic of Ebola has subsided, but the race for a vaccine continued.

Well now a new vaccine will be injected into half a million Congolese despite scientists concern over the lack of testing of the vaccine.

Reuters reports:

The new vaccine, which has passed clinical trials but has never been tested in a real-world setting, will be administered to 50,000 people in Goma, a city of two million on the Rwandan border, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said in a statement.

The vaccine, which requires two injections eight weeks apart, will be rolled out alongside another manufactured by Merck, which only requires a single shot. The Merck vaccine has been administered to over 250,000 people since the start of the outbreak in August 2018.

“The introduction of a second vaccine is not meant to replace [Merck’s] vaccine, but to complement it and hopefully provide us with an additional tool in the fight against future Ebola outbreaks,” said John Johnson, who is leading the project for MSF.

We see this time and time again in the vaccine industry, using untested, potentially unsafe products on the people of developing nations. We recently reported on the new Malaria vaccine which is to be tested in selected small town and villages in Africa - but once against scientists have raised concerns over the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine.

Four doses of the vaccine will give just a 30% chance of protection against severe malaria for up to 3 years, and furthermore experts are concerned that the vaccine only provides postponement of the disease.

But efficacy is not the worst of it, the safety concerns are far more worrisome.

In the largest trial, children who received Mosquirix had a risk of meningitis 10 times higher than those who received a control vaccine.