The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the beginning of the first clinical trial of an Ebola vaccine in the outbreak that started in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a social media post on Friday that participants in the trial were vaccinated with the Ervebo vaccine in Bunia, the capital of the DRC’s northeastern Ituri province, which is the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak.
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Ervebo, a vaccine approved for use against the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, will be put through a full-scale human trial to see if it offers any cross-protection against the Bundibugyo species of Ebola that is behind the epidemic.
“This trial will help us understand whether any of the vaccine candidates designed for Bundibugyo virus work,” the WHO chief said on X.
“WHO is supporting this DRC-led effort to find answers and save lives,” he added.
The DRC declared its 17th and worst-ever Ebola outbreak in May and has since reported more than 9,700 cases, with the number of deaths exceeding 4,600.
The WHO, in response, triggered a public health emergency of international concern, its second-highest alert level.
The current outbreak has now been reported in four countries across eastern, central and western Africa, giving it the widest geographic spread of any Ebola outbreak on the continent to date.
Vaccines in the pipeline
The so-called Tumaini trial is a single trial framework that can test the safety, efficacy and immunogenicity of multiple vaccines.
The trial will use a ring vaccination approach: immunising contacts deemed to be at high risk of infection.
The trial is set to incorporate two Bundibugyo-specific candidate vaccines, which are currently advancing through earlier-stage, smaller-scale clinical trials.
One is a ChAdOx1 adenoviral vector jab being developed by the University of Oxford; the other, by the US-based Moderna group, uses mRNA technology.
Both have received funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and are expected to enter the trial “shortly”, CEPI said in a statement.
The trial will include pregnant women and children aged 12 years and older, generating evidence for populations that are often excluded from clinical trials.
WHO emergencies director Chikwe Ihekweazu said the trial was set up to generate the rigorous evidence needed to determine whether the participating vaccines could protect people at risk.
“We need people in Congress who have the background, the training, the knowledge to basically hold this administration accountable,” Pan said last week on a baking 100-degree day in the Sacramento suburbs.
“I know what it’s like to be on the front lines,” said Pan, who spent a dozen years teaching and practicing pediatrics before being elected to the Assembly in 2010. “I’ve seen measles, right?”
The political organization 3.14 Action — its name a decimal approximation of pi — has recruited and helped elect hundreds of candidates from STEM backgrounds (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and endorsed more than 500 of those running this year, including Pan in his race in Sacramento and in neighboring Placer and Yolo counties.
Dr. Richard Pan meets Dr. Teah Harris-Johnson and her daughter before participating in a roundtable discussion at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who worked on drug discovery and breast cancer research, founded 3.14 Action in 2016 after two unsuccessful tries for a congressional seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. When she started the organization, Naughton noted, there were more talk radio hosts on Capitol Hill than scientists and engineers. (Nearly two dozen doctors and nurses currently serve in Congress. More than 30 have run this election cycle.)
“There isn’t an issue that doesn’t benefit by having fact-based decision-makers, people that will go into office as problem-solvers,” Naughton said from Pennsylvania, which is in the throes of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy has downplayed the severity, even as the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases is rising.
“That’s essentially what scientists and physicians are,” Naughton said. “They are problem-solvers. and clearly our country is facing a lot of problems.”
Among those she cited was “the arsonist in charge of HHS.”
Like his jury-rigged political persona, Kiley seems to want it both ways on vaccines.
Before going to Congress, while serving in the Assembly, Kiley voted against Pan’s legislation cracking down on fraudulent vaccine exemptions. He’s described vaccines as a vital public health tool, but condemned government mandates and suggested vaccination should be a matter of parental choice. He claims Pan has eroded public trust by politicizing the issue.
As for Kennedy, Kiley told the San Francisco Chronicle a lot of things “that I don’t agree with,” though he’s never called out the secretary for his cuckoo-land theories — vaccines cause autism, the fluoride in public water supplies is making Americans “stupider,” and many more — or denounced his destructive policies.
That passivity, Pan said, amounts to complicity.
“It’s not just simply a talking point,” Pan said of public health policy. “It’s reality and we need to have policy based on what’s really happening, not on some ideological conspiracy theory.”
Dr. Richard Pan participates in a discussion during a Black maternal health roundtable last week at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.
Like most Democrats, he’s made affordability a key part of his candidacy, citing higher gas and grocery prices and, inevitably, the rising cost of healthcare and the roughly $1-trillion cut from Medicaid under last year’s Big Sop To Billionaires Bill.
The super-wealthy got tax cuts, Pan told a silver-haired audience at a 55-and-older community in Roseville, while the bill will make healthcare less accessible for millions and undermine both Medicare and Social Security. Kiley supported the legislation, the centerpiece of Trump’s second term. As a doctor and state lawmaker, Pan said, he worked to expand healthcare and address the needs of his community.
“We don’t pass laws to make lives harder,” Pan said. “That’s what he’s done.”
Later, at a forum on Black maternal health, Pan said Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the so-called war on woke ignores glaring disparities in the treatment of Black women versus other patients. “The data is there,” said Pan, speaking before a banner decorated with purple butterflies and the proclamation, “Black Mothers Matter.”
“The facts are there,” Pan went on. “It’s a very, very real problem and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be solved.”
He brought up, somewhat sheepishly, his campaign.
“That’s why I’m running,” Pan said, to “have another person in Congress … who’s going to tell the administration we are not going to bury DEI. We’re not going to bury disparities. These are real problems.”
