Scientists develop vaccine to counter Ebola

Scientists have developed a vaccine to counter the Ebola virus which killed 11,000 people in West Africa a few years ago. Armed with the new drug doctors say a large outbreak of the same magnitude was unlikely to ever happen again. 

Hailing the breakthrough, The Lancet yesterday said that the world now had a potent weapon against Ebola that brought the outbreak to a screeching halt.

"We were able to estimate the efficacy of the vaccine as being 100 per cent in a trial," says Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, who helped test the vaccine. "It's very unusual to have a vaccine that protects people perfectly."

Longini and his colleagues tested the vaccine on about 4,000 people in Guinea in 2015, when the epidemic was still spreading there. These people were at high risk of contracting the disease as they had had contact with someone who was infected.

When they were administered the vaccine, they were completely protected without any incidenc of contracting the sickness.

The vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV has not been been approved yet by either the World Health Organization or the US Food and Drug Administration, which is expected to happen sometime in 2018.

However, there still remained a few open questions about the vaccine, according to Dr Anthony Fauci, at the National Institutes of Health. 

National Public radio quoted him as saying, "For example, we don't know how durable the vaccine is," he says. "If you give healthcare workers the vaccine, for example, how long would they be protected? That's very important to learn."

The study of the vaccine was led by the World Health Organization. The vaccine was developed by the Canadian government and has been licensed to the US-based Merck & Co. 

The vaccine was administered to around 5,800 people, all of whom had some contact with a new Ebola patient, in Guinea last year, as the virus was waning. 

They were given the vaccine right away or three weeks later, and it was found that after 10-day waiting period, no Ebola cases developed in those immediately vaccinated, 23 cases turned up among those with delayed vaccination.