The international vaccine development and distribution organization Gavi announced this week that it had committed $50 million to responding to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), $40 million of which would go to building up supply chains in preparation of mass production of an Ebola Bundibugyo vaccine.
Gavi, formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, is a coalition that raises funds from public and private actors and serves as a platform for the development of new vaccines and the expansion of access to established vaccines all around the world, with a focus on vulnerable and impoverished areas. As no vaccine currently exists for the pathogen causing the Ebola outbreak centered in Ituri province, DRC, Gavi explained in a press release on Monday that it is focusing on preparing global manufacturing infrastructure to mass produce a future vaccine.
“While we are some way off having a safe and effective vaccine against Bundibugyo virus, we need to act now to ensure that, once one or more vaccine candidates are ready, manufacturers are in a position to start producing doses at scale,” Sania Nishtar, the CEO of Gavi, said in a press released shared via email with Breitbart News. “Leveraging this allocation, Gavi will work closely with CEPI and partners to design the right incentives to achieve this goal, exploring all options including potential Advance Purchase Commitments.”
“This effort, alongside ensuring emergency funds are on hand to support outbreak response and protect routine immunization services in the communities impacted, is exactly what our First Response Fund was designed for,” Nishtar added.
The First Response Fund is where the $50 million will reportedly be taken from. Gavi explains that the objective of the fund is to offer money for “scaled-up production of vaccines under development” to ensure the deployment of the new vaccines in affected areas as quickly as possible. Gavi noted in its announcement that $50 million is the highest amount that the organization can rapidly deploy without going through the Gavi Board approval process. It also explained in its press release that Gavi is seeking to create mechanisms “for manufacturers to adopt the fastest pathways towards W.H.O. [World Health Organization] Emergency Use Listing (EUL) and/or W.H.O. Prequalification (PQ), which are critical global approvals that will enable the rapid use of these vaccines in future emergencies.”
The W.H.O. announced the discovery of an Ebola outbreak in Ituri province in May, revealing that it had been delayed in identifying cases since the pathogen is the less common Bundibugyo variant of the virus rather than the more common Zaire or Sudan strains. Vaccines exist to contain the spread of the Zaire strain, but no inoculation products or treatments currently exist to fight Bundibugyo. The W.H.O. estimates that Bundibugyo has a fatality rate between 30 and 50 percent.
As of Monday, the latest update on the situation, the W.H.O. has documented 116 suspected cases of Ebola in DRC and Uganda as well as 330 confirmed cases and 49 confirmed deaths. Six people have recovered in the current outbreak. The numbers were reduced from the previous update in which the W.H.O. documented nearly 1000 suspected cases and 223 suspected deaths.
International organizations, including Gavi, have expressed significant interest in helping promote the creation of an Ebola Bundibugyo vaccine. In May, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) suggested that, with enough resources, a vaccine could be developed within 100 days.
“Will we achieve it in 100 days? Possibly, it’s a big lift. We are now into the many hundreds of cases and hundreds of deaths, but the truth of the matter is that real numbers are much bigger than that,” Jane Halton, the chair of the CEPI board, said.
In its initial statement on the DRC Ebola outbreak, Gavi suggested some hesitation in distributing existing bundles of Ebola Zaire vaccines as there is “extremely limited available evidence on cross-protection against non-Zaire species.” It also observed, however, that some Bundibugyo options were already in process. Two potential vaccine candidates include a candidate “leveraging rVSV platform (the same platform as the licensed vaccine against Zaire ebolavirus, Ervebo) but targeted towards Bundibugyo,” while another one is “leveraging the ChAdOx platform (used for licensed COVID-19 vaccines) and targeted towards Bundibugyo virus.”
The first, it observed, could take months to produce enough doses for clinical trials, while for the second, it noted, “there are no animal or human studies for this vaccine and no data on its use against BVD [Bundibugyo].”
In addition to the lack of currently available inoculation options, public health experts face a prodigious challenge with local trust regarding medical innovations. Communities in eastern DRC already have pervasive skepticism regarding Western humanitarian aid, including the widespread belief that Ebola is not real and is being used as an excuse to exterminate Africans. Health workers in DRC have experienced multiple violent mob attacks on their clinics by individuals seeking to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones or help living Ebola patients “escape” what they believe to be a certain death in the care of international health workers.
The first attempt to distribute novel Ebola vaccines in DRC triggered a major political scandal and the resignation of the country’s health minister, who denounced international pharmaceutical corporations for refusing to allow the government to address “trust” issues on the ground. In 2019, Johnson & Johnson attempted to start a vaccine trial for Ebola in Ituri and neighboring North Kivu province, resulting in then-Health Minister Oly Ilunga accusing vaccine promoters of lacking “ethics” and ultimately leaving the job.
“[It is] fanciful to think that the new vaccine proposed by actors who have shown an obvious lack of ethics by voluntarily hiding important information from medical authorities, could have a significant impact on the control of the current outbreak,” Ilunga railed in his resignation letter.
To address “trust issues” in DRC, the director-general of the W.H.O. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally visited Ituri this weekend, emphasizing in an open letter to the people of Congo that as a fellow African he will be present and involved in the outbreak response.