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Ebola Vaccine Gives 100 Percent Protection, Could Be Readily Available By 2018 (bbc.com)
According to a study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, an experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus was found to be 100 percent effective. The results offer hope of better protection against the disease that ravaged West Africa in 2014, killing more than 11,000 people. From a report on BBC: A highly effective vaccine that guards against the deadly Ebola virus could be available by 2018, says the World Health Organization. Trials conducted in Guinea, one of the West African countries most affected by an outbreak of Ebola that ended this year, show it offers 100% protection. The vaccine is now being fast-tracked for regulatory approval. Manufacturer Merck has made 300,000 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine available for use should Ebola strike.
GAVI, the global vaccine alliance, provided $5m for the stockpile.
Results, published in The Lancet medical journal, show of nearly 6,000 people receiving the vaccine, all were free of the virus 10 days later. In a group of the same size not vaccinated, 23 later developed Ebola. Only one person who was vaccinated had a serious side effect that the researchers think was caused by the jab.
...among anti-vaxxers :)
Know that Marburg and Reston are sometimes called Ebola but are not the same as Ebola Zebov. Still what ever trick was done to find a protective antigen can likely be repeated for these. The most important aspect of this is that it can protect health workers. Treating Ebola patients in hot climates is hard to do when you have to wear so much protective gear.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can't tell which way you're being unhelpful. Are you maligning the medical establishment for not releasing it right away when it could save lives? Are you genuinely suggesting that we just shove it onto the market? Because surely you know that if it gets released and as soon as there's any hint of an adverse event that the anti-vaccer & Mercola crew will be screaming about how this is just another effort by Big Pharma to experiment on or sterilize poor African villagers who surely would have been better off dying of hemorrhagic fever. For good or bad, you have to at least look at some efficacy and safety data or you might as well be practicing homeopathy with a tincture of lead.
Pretty sure this is just a classic science journalism mistranslation. The actual scientific study says that the estimated efficacy from the experimental results, to a 95% confidence interval, is 100%. Because no one in the trial got the disease. That is not the same as the colloquial version of "100% effectiveness" that you are thinking of.
I posted this story, not msmash.
Is this happening to other people too? For example, might there be someone other than BeauHD who posted a renewable energy story?
Well, that'd be great... but who's going to fund the synthesis of a plane-load of vaccine, and the training for a plane-load of qualified staff to administer it, and then also fund the two plane flights to Africa? You're asking for a few tens of millions of dollars, minimum... and that's not even considering the logistics involved in ensuring that the vaccines aren't immediately seized upon landing, and used as leverage in a civil war.
Maybe you think that the lab techs, nurses, pilots, maintainers, security personnel and diplomats should all just volunteer their time. That's nice, but then who's going to volunteer to feed them as well? Maybe you think the pharmaceutical company should just pay for everything, but they already do a lot of that, and that's partly why American medicine prices are so high.
...or maybe you just have no idea how the world works, and just want to enrage Slashdot readers.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
As I understand TFS, there's a lot of doses available now that could be used to cover an outbreak, but those are not covered by full regulatory approval, and manufacturing capability is also probably rather low right now.
Once full approval comes through, in about a year, the vaccine would be generally available, and I would expect it to become part of the recommended treatment for anyone going to a risky area, as is currently the case with the yellow fever vaccine.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Let's say we're 97% sure it's wonderful and has no adverse side effects. That's good enough to jump to conclusions, but not good enough to start giving it to millions of people. Does that make sense?
Because sometimes science figures stuff out and sometimes it doesn't. Everything is not a conspiracy. Rich people die of cancer frequently. Even Steve Jobs. And yet we haven't fixed cancer in 4 years...10...100. Rich people get colds. We have colds. Rich people get HIV. We have drugs to control it but no cure. Everyone gets urinary tract infections and we can treat those no problem. Everyone gets chicken pox and we can vaccinate against it. Blah blah blah. Sometimes we find the cure of the vaccine and sometimes we don't. Despite the rhetoric from conspiracy folks like yourself, sometimes there is no conspiracy, just science. Likewise, just because someone in the government says we're going to "moon shot" and fix cancer within a decade, doesn't actually mean it's going to be happening. Science and medicine don't actually care what your rhetoric is and they certainly don't care whether you think something is fair or whether you think something SHOULD be curable.
Not racism. There's no money in selling drugs to poor people, and the owners of the drug companies are rich westerners who won't get dengue, but might get Ebola. Their lives are just a BIT more important than other peoples'.
Far more Western people get dengue than ebola. Pretty much all the victims of ebola are poor people; the non-poor victims can be counted on the fingers of one, maybe two hands. In other words, there is no money to be made on ebola vaccins, and yet Western companies created one anyway. Would you care to adjust your prejudices?
I'm worried about the effectiveness of the vaccin. What if none of the vaccinated group even came into contact with the virus?
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Let's say we're 97% sure it's wonderful and has no adverse side effects. That's good enough to jump to conclusions, but not good enough to start giving it to millions of people. Does that make sense?
This.
Also, going from small batches in lab reactors to large scale production doesn't happen overnight. Sourcing, production, packaging, shipment, etc.
When developing new meds we also do long(er) term safety data collection that you simply can't do without time. The testing isn't to figure out if it's life saving, the extra time is to make sure that to the best of our ability, reasonably, there isn't some safety item we're missing and to refine dosing and production to optimum levels.
If you'd seen a lot of drug trials, as some of us have, you'd realize that the results shown so far aren't hype and are incredibly promising and worthy of publishing. But they still aren't the end-all-be-all of the drug production process. Hype would be publishing that any one of 1000 anticancer drugs was "GOING TO END CANCER FOREVER" because it kills a cancer cell in a petri dish.
The criticism is over the hype. It's totally life saving but we need another year to test that it really is life saving. So which is it, well understood enough to actually be life saving or not well understood enough and requiring more testing?
Both. It can be clearly life saving with regards to the disease it is meant to treat while at the same time not being studied enough to be given the stamp of approval. In pharmacology we talk about a Perfect Drug which would only do what you want, when you want it, and without any side effects. Perfect drugs pretty much don't exist...hence side effects. That doesn't mean they don't do the thing they're meant to do (e.g. Save Life) but it means they also do other things (e.g. Cause your eyes to change color). Just because you know that it does Good Thing reliably doesn't say anything about whether it will also cause Bad Thing.
Analogy:
New car feature allows cars to stop in any conditions 100% of the time before rear ending car in front of them. Clearly this is life saving as no one ever gets into a rear end accident. Understood and clear. Unfortunately after a year of use it becomes clear that the mechanism for sudden stop damages the drive train in all cars beyond repair. Doesn't change that it saves lives. But probably not ready for mass market with that particular long term side effect.