The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned this Wednesday that experimental vaccines against the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola will still take months to be ready for clinical trials, a day after the director general of the organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, convened the emergency committee to analyze the outbreak that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and that has already expanded to Uganda, with almost 600 suspected cases and 179 deaths also under suspicion. “We do not have any approved vaccine for Bundibugyo,” Vasee Moorthy, head of WHO clinical trials, stated this Wednesday during a press conference in which he acknowledged that there are two vaccines with hopeful trials within a reasonable period of time.
The candidate considered most promising is a vaccine called “rVSV-Bundibugyo”, designed specifically for this variant of the virus and based on the same viral platform as the Ervebo vaccine (rVSV-ZEBOV), the only one authorized so far against the Zaire strain of Ebola. “There are currently no doses available for clinical trials,” explained Moorthy, who has placed the period necessary for it to begin testing in humans at “between six and nine months.”
Moorthy has detailed that there is a second candidate that could advance faster: a vaccine based on the ChAdOx1 platform, “the same platform used by the AstraZeneca vaccine” against covid-19 developed in collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India. “They are manufacturing it as we speak,” he assured. However, he clarified that there are still “no animal data to support” its effectiveness and safety. According to him, there could be doses for clinical trials “in two or three months”, although he insisted that “there is a lot of uncertainty” and that everything will depend on the results of these previous studies.
The expert explained that “the machinery is fully activated to accelerate research and development of medical countermeasures” against the outbreak and recalled that the WHO and its partners have been working “for many years and through previous outbreaks” on the development of tools against Ebola. “There is a very promising line of therapies,” he stated.
Despite the scientific effort, Moorthy has insisted that the immediate priority remains to strengthen the health response on the ground. “We must expand intensive care” and strengthen hospital capacity and “early detection” to contain the outbreak. “Our priority is to cut the chain of transmission” and that “each suspected case can be detected early and receive care,” added Anaïs Legand, technician at the WHO Health Emergencies Program.
Tedros has also defended the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s initial response to criticism by . The director general of the WHO has explained that the province of Ituri, where the first cases were detected, has been affected by armed violence for years, a situation that has worsened recently. “In the last two years [el conflicto] “It has been very intense,” he noted. As he detailed, more than 100,000 people have been displaced in the region, “including health workers,” which has affected the operation of clinics and epidemiological surveillance systems. “I think it is very important to understand what the situation is,” he stressed.
The identification of the Bundibugyo strain represented, according to Tedros, an additional difficulty because many of the rapid tests used are optimized to detect the Zaire variant of the virus. “Others [tipos de ébola] “they may not be detected,” he acknowledged during the press conference, in which he insisted that the “Bundibugyo strain is very rare and complicated to detect.” In addition, he recalled that the initial symptoms “are the same as those of malaria and typhoid fever,” endemic diseases in the DRC.
