FDA Approves First-Ever Ebola Vaccine (go.com) 34
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a vaccine for the prevention of the deadly Ebola virus disease. The agency announced the approval of Ervebo, a single-dose, injectable vaccine manufactured by American pharmaceutical company Merck. The announcement, made Thursday, comes a month after the European Union and the World Health Organization, the global health arm of the United Nations, both approved the Ebola vaccine.
"While the risk of Ebola virus disease in the U.S. remains low, the U.S. government remains deeply committed to fighting devastating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, including the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Anna Abram, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, said in a statement Thursday. "Today's approval is an important step in our continuing efforts to fight Ebola in close coordination with our partners across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as our international partners, such as the World Health Organization." Congolese health officials and the WHO began using Ervebo last year as an experimental vaccine to help mitigate the epidemic. More than 258,000 people have been vaccinated in the outbreak zone so far. A second experimental vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson, was recently deployed in the 2-million-person city of Goma, according to Congolese health officials.
"While the risk of Ebola virus disease in the U.S. remains low, the U.S. government remains deeply committed to fighting devastating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, including the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Anna Abram, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, said in a statement Thursday. "Today's approval is an important step in our continuing efforts to fight Ebola in close coordination with our partners across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as our international partners, such as the World Health Organization." Congolese health officials and the WHO began using Ervebo last year as an experimental vaccine to help mitigate the epidemic. More than 258,000 people have been vaccinated in the outbreak zone so far. A second experimental vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson, was recently deployed in the 2-million-person city of Goma, according to Congolese health officials.
And after injection, (Score:2)
Nothing of value was lost.
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"Now instead of dying of eBola, Afrikans will get this vaccine and fewer of their people will die."
Hardly. It will be for rich tourists that go slumming there.
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Thats a whole new power grid.
The EU can give money for the import of solar and wind power sold by EU nations.
More people in Africa, more people needing EU wind power, solar power, EU nation telco networks.
Billions ins pending on EU support services.
More vaccine, more generations of consumers for EU exports in Africa.
NGOs, start your engines (Score:2)
Will the anti-science lobby weaponize NGOs to stir up opposition to Ebola vaccinations in Africa, as they did with Golden Rice?
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Ultimately, Darwin should take care of this. Assuming a vaccine is safe, effective, and available in affected areas, most deaths will be people that (for whatever reason) didn't get themselves vaccinated. Yes there's herd immunity (or lack thereof), but even then victims will mostly be the ones that didn't get a vaccine. And survivors the ones that did.
Genetics teaches us that given enough time, difference between [chance of surviving] and [chance of dying from a disease] need not be big to give the prec
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Which NGOs have ever taken an anti-vaccination stand?
You can't criticize people for things they haven't done yet.
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I'm talking about this campaign, against genetic engineering of food crops, even when GMO techniques could save lives in Africa:
https://www.tandfonline.com/do... [tandfonline.com]
Using them for an antivax campaign in the same way is the logical next step. Genocide - it's not just for long-dead historical figures any more.
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Why is anti-vaccination the next logical step to some people being anti-GMO?
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Greenpeace - it's founder is anti-vaccine and the organization itself is anti-everything.
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So your position is that people are responsible for the positions taken by anyone they've ever associated with?
I've searched for any Greenpeace position on vaccination and the only thing I can find is a story about their developing a solar-powered vaccine refrigerator. The stuff on their website seems to take it for granted that vaccination is a good thing.
Now it's possible that Greenpeace may change it's position in the future to be anti-vaccine, but you can't reasonably hold that against them until they
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Golden rice deserved the opposition. It didn't store well and its actual content of Vitamin A was too low to be significant. Grow a few carrots instead. It also tasted funny, so people didn't like it.
A better example would be the stirring up of opposition to vaccination against polio, but that was as much the fault of the CIA as any other group. (It didn't [apparently] continue being the fault of the CIA, but their fake health workers set off the opposition.)
Not the First Vaccine (Score:1)
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It is the first Ebola to get FDA-approval.
Even the summary made it clear that there are other vaccines. They just do not have FDA-approval.
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Cat's out of the bag (Score:2)
First identified in Sudan in 1976, that's about 40 years for the World to develop a vaccine approved for use on humans.
Wiki:
Many Ebola vaccine candidates had been developed in the decade prior to 2014,[105] but as of November 2014, none had been approved for use in humans in the United States.[106][107][108][109] In December 2016, Ebola was found to be 70–100% prevented by rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, making it the first proven vaccine against the disease.[8][110][111] More than 100,000 people have been vaccinated against Ebola as of 2019.[112]
Ebola was contained fairly well in local populations during the first outbreaks in Africa. Assuming the deadly viral hemorrhagic fever became a more immediate threat to worldwide populations, perhaps by evolving to spread like the flu instead of by direct contact with body fluids, I wonder how much faster a vaccine could have been deployed.
We likely face pandemics of this sort in the
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The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes that genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.
Re:Cat's out of the bag (Score:5, Interesting)
Ebola is a little too virulent; I think the most it ever killed in a year is about 12,000 globally. This makes it possible to contain with public health measures. Influenza kills about a half million people a year. It really can't be contained.
But Ebola is just the start, and it should be a wake up call. There's a lot more like it coming, and it has nothing to do with scientists editing pathogen genes; it has everything to do with the spread of commerce.
Years ago I worked with a primatologist who was developing recommendations for an African country to protect the health of its great ape populations. The concern was that ecotourists would act as an infectious disease vector between isolated ape populations. She built a mobile diagnostic lab that could be carried by porters (just like in the old Tarzan movies) into the bush with the idea that she'd stage these things in-country and deploy them in an outbreak of an unknown virus. When she did field-testing she was astonished that as soon as she started looking for unknown pathogens, she started finding them. That's what I always say about field research: there's nothing like looking if you want to find stuff.
There's a school of thought among ecologists that endemic pathogens may protect local populations from incursions by outsiders. Local populations of mice, for example, can harbor strains of hantavirus which are an annoyance for them but are deadly to outsiders.
As humans continue to reshape local ecosystems, and tie the globe together with rapid transportation links, there is the potential for any number of obscure, remote local pathogens to break out as "emergent" diseases. There's probably dozens, if not thousands of viruses out there like Ebola. It's already happening, take Zika, which in 1947 was found in a single forest in Uganda, but is now spread across the entire tropical belt of the planet. The same for Chikagunya, which local to Tanzania in 1953 but now is global in scope.
I expect we'll see something like that happen at least once a decade for the rest of this century. It's already happening [wikipedia.org].
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Sure; Marburg for one. But that's just one clade of viruses. What I'm saying is there is a lot of stuff out there we don't know about yet.
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Developing drugs is hard and expensive, and yes, it takes decades sometimes to do it. A vaccine with 70% effective rates is not really a vaccine. Sure it will help reduce the death toll but it's not sufficient to contain an outbreak. Moreover, vaccines could be dangerous to various people including the immunosuppressed, older people or children which would make it unacceptable to be deployed in an area like pretty much all of Africa, where resistance to modern medicine and vaccination is pretty much baked i
If only (Score:1)
the U.S. government remains deeply committed to fighting devastating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, including the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
If only the US government was as committed to nation-building at home as much as it was in hostile countries who hate us, America would be a better place. We spend billions defending the borders of other countries while we cannot secure our own.
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Considering the damage the "nation building" normally does, I don't want it done around here.
Once Again, The Onion Predicted It (Score:2)
sounds too much like "placebo" (Score:2)