WHO says two Ebola vaccine candidates exist, rollout expected in 6–9 months

A World Health Organisation (WHO) official has said there are two potential vaccine candidates for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, but they are not expected to be available for several months, with production likely to take six to nine months.

Dr Vasee Moorthy, of the WHO’s research and development division, noted that one of the vaccines is known as RVSV-Bundibugyo, but that no doses are currently available for clinical trials, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

He added that researchers at the University of Oxford are also developing a vaccine using the same ChAdOx platform as the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, but it has not yet undergone animal or human trials.

“They are manufacturing that as we speak… it is possible that doses of that could be available for clinical trial in two to three months, but there is a lot of uncertainty about that and it will depend on the animal data as to whether that is considered a promising candidate,” Moorthy said, adding that timelines remain uncertain and depend on preclinical results.

In the absence of a vaccine or specific treatments, WHO officials say outbreak control will rely on rapid identification, isolation and treatment of suspected cases in order to break chains of transmission.

Meanwhile, experts have warned that the Ebola outbreak in central Africa may be significantly larger than official figures suggest.

The WHO has reported nearly 600 suspected cases and 179 deaths in the outbreak affecting remote areas of north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, a study by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London estimates that the true scale could be substantially higher, with up to 1,700 cases in a worst-case scenario.

The study’s central estimate places the number of cases between 400 and 800, based on two separate modelling approaches.

By Bakhtiyar Abbasov