WHO Says 1000s of Ebola Vaccine Doses Available in Coming Months
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Thousands of doses of experimental Ebola vaccines should be available in the coming months and could eventually be given to health care workers and other people who have had contact with the sick, the World Health Organization said Friday.
No vaccine has yet been proven safe or effective in humans, said Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general at WHO, who spoke at a press conference in Geneva that was later shared by email. Testing must first be done to ensure they are not harmful to people, some of which has already begun, she said.
The Canadian government has already donated 800 vials of one vaccine, which it developed before licensing to NewLink Genetics Corp., Kieny said, and the company is expected to produce several thousand more doses in the coming months. It's unclear how many doses the 800 vials hold because testing needs to be done to determine how large an effective dose is, but Kieny said it was probably about 1,500.
By the beginning of next year, there should be about 10,000 doses of another vaccine, developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline, Kieny said.
"This will not be a mass vaccination campaign," she said, adding that health workers or people known to have had contact with an infected person could be given a vaccine as early as January.
The Ebola outbreak sweeping West Africa is believed to have killed more than 2,900 people, and it has overwhelmed health systems and defied the typical methods used to stem Ebola's spread. Experts are hoping that experimental treatments and vaccines might be able to play some role.
But Kieny warned that until its effectiveness is proven, anyone receiving a vaccine in this outbreak would still have to operate as if they are not protected against Ebola.
WHO has also prioritized using blood from Ebola survivors and says further studies are needed to determine if it can help people ill with the disease. Such blood transfusions have already been done on a small scale, notably in an American doctor who became infected in Liberia.
Developing a serum treatment from the antibodies of many survivors would require more extensive lab facilities and trained technicians, Kieny said. WHO is looking into whether those facilities can be put in place.
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Cheng contributed to this report from London.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press.
