Via STAT, Helen Branswell writes: Second Ebola vaccine to be used soon in DRC outbreak. Excerpt:
The Democratic Republic of the Congo will begin using a second Ebola vaccine as early as next week, the company developing the experimental product, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), said Thursday. J&J announced it is donating enough of the product to vaccinate up to 500,000 people.
The vaccine will be used as part of a clinical trial, but the aim is as much to help extinguish the long-running outbreak in the country’s northeast as it is to gather data on the effectiveness of the vaccine, which does not yet have a brand name.
“We are very excited to be able to contribute,” Dr. Johan van Hoof, global head of Janssen Infectious Diseases and Vaccines, J&J’s vaccines division, told STAT. “We see this as a significant milestone having worked so long on this that this is now going to be used.”
In recent weeks the outbreak has appeared to be waning, with fewer cases in October than any month since September 2018. Should the outbreak end in the next couple of months, it’s not clear whether the trial will be able to determine if the vaccine is as protective as earlier studies would suggest. The company has tested the vaccine in primates — a good model for human infection — and has monitored both how high antibody levels rose and how long they remained elevated in people who were vaccinated in Phase 2 trials.
“It’s very difficult to predict either way whether this will allow us to assess effectiveness for this particular outbreak,” van Hoof acknowledged, though he noted the outbreak is unpredictable and it’s far too soon to conclude it may soon end.
“At the end of the day it’s only in this type of setting that we will able to assess effectiveness one day,” he said. “And hopefully we can do it now. But that’s not sure.”
