
Ebola vaccine is 'potential game-changer' - polskibus
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33733711
======
kayone
A friend of mine was one of the primary researcher working on the vaccine in
the Winnipeg lab. I remember going out to dinners past few years and keep
hearing about him his work on this vaccine. One thing that really bothered me
was how the government handled it at the end and how the vaccine was handed to
NewLink (Which latter licensed it to Merc) for pretty much nothing.

From what I remember, a year or so before the outbreak and just after the
development of the vaccine was pretty much done Health Canada decides that
there will be no money in an ebola vaccine since they didn't foresee an
outbreak and even if it did happen it would be in a third world country with
not much money to go around.

So they put a warp on it and hand it to NewLink for $200,000. Apparently there
were emails going around between the lab and the government trying to convince
them that this is a shitty deal, but the end response was 200K is the most
we'll ever get out of this.

a year later, the biggest outbreak in the history and NewLink licenses the
Vaccine to Merck for $50M USD.

My main issue with it isn't that the vaccine was gone for $200K vs $50M, if
you have spent god know how many millions and how many years developing a
vaccine as part of government program, don't let it go for 200K, are we as a
nation really hurting that much to have to recover that 200K? I just can't
make any sense of it. and if you were thinking they sold it so it could be
mass produced and developed then you are mistaken since NewLink did exactly
nothing with it until they licensed it to Merck.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine-
develop...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine-development-
taken-over-by-merck-1.2847128)

~~~
spdy
What hit me most today after is saw the news. For many years ebola killed
people and only after it hit mainstream media and it could have been an
potential threat to the western world. Money just magical appears and we have
a vaccine in less than a year.

~~~
melling
Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s.
There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_\(film\))

It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I think you misinterpreted the comment you're responding to.

~~~
melling
No, I didn't. The scare of an epidemic in the U.S. has been real for decades.

This sort of snide comment has been made before. In fact, in the "malaria
thread" just a few days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354)

Ma8ee wrote: "Considering the nature of market economies and how the wealth is
distributed in the world, it is not particularly surprising that most most
medical research is aiming to cure ailments that affect white western men."

------
harshreality
There are other hemorrhagic fevers with no vaccine. I don't think we should
get too carried away with Ebola just because it has, roughly speaking, a
higher mortality rate, and has been kept in the news by this latest outbreak.

The ability to make a vaccine that looks promising a year after a major
outbreak occurs is good, but not so impressive. A better achievement is, will
be, developing processes to create vaccines for viruses, even previously
unknown viruses, rapidly, being able to target viruses in places and stages
current vaccines can't handle[1][2], and developing ways of testing a
vaccine's efficacy without waiting for a large outbreak.

Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague (readily found by searching for the title
in combination with epub) chronicles some encounters and research with various
pathogens including several hemorrhagic fevers.

[1] Rabies still kills tens of thousands of people a year in Asia and Africa,
in places where "get vaccinated" is not the standard response to getting
bitten by a wild animal (the major vector of Rabies there is feral dogs); by
the time symptoms appear it's too late. That's more people dead of Rabies _per
year_ than have died in the known history of Ebola outbreaks.

[2] Or, for example, HIV.

------
cm2187
To me the main benefit of the vaccine is that it will calm the hysteria around
Ebola. It's a nasty disease but the infection rate is fairly low. The media
play a dangerous game crying wolf every month on what end up being relatively
minor outbreaks. The list is now pretty long: Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow
disease, Ebola. Every time they bring back the spectre of the Spanish flu
which wiped out a hundred million of people.

HIV kills about a million people a year. It might be old news but that's
several orders of magnitude the scale of Ebola.

------
mschuster91
The question is, who is gonna pay for vaccinations? I don't believe that
Western aid organizations can and will put up the money, and most African
countries will not be able to.

Another problem is that many people are led to believe by their religious
authorities that vaccines are the devil, white men are the devils... how are
these parts of the population going to be protected to prevent creation of
virus reservoirs?

~~~
gus_massa
The virus reservoirs of Ebola are in monkeys and bats, humans die too fast to
be a long term reservoir. Survivors are not contagious.

Anyway, "Who will pay the bill?" is a good question.

------
aries1980
This vaccine is for prevention. There is no cure for the infected.

------
na85
Yet more evidence that vaccines do work and the anti-vaccine people are idiots
of the highest order.

~~~
spacehome
"highest order" is a bit strong, no? It's not totally inconceivable that
vaccines could have negative health effects.

~~~
fsloth
No, it's not strong. We've forgotten what a true pestilence like polio does
because vaccination programs have all but eradicated it. Those diseases killed
and maimed - only idiots without understanding of history and suffering would
oppose vaccination programs. Bad things happen to people, and sometimes due to
medical errors, but vaccination programs are the few things that are simple to
implement and reduce human suffering

------
sillygeese
So we're not supposed to be afraid of Ebola anymore?

Or will the new vaccine conveniently save a Western country from a sudden,
mysterious outbreak of Ebola?

The new Ebola vaccine is produced by Merck, and.. Oh look! _Former CDC
Director Now President of Merck 's Vaccine Unit_:

[http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/0...](http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/02/merck-
flu-vaccine-conflicts.aspx)

>> _In the summer of 2011, Merck president Julie Gerberding said in a news
interview1 that she 's "very bullish on vaccines," as she recounted the
various ways she helps Merck sell its products. What she didn't divulge was
her motivation for leaving her job as director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and
drug companies—and join Merck in the first place, back in January 2010._*

I'm sure that's completely unrelated. Nothing to see here, peon, move along!

EDIT:

It gets even "better":

>> _The CDC disseminated extremely exaggerated data on the 2009 H1N1
"pandemic" and urged almost everyone in the U.S. to take the new, untested
vaccines. When questions arose, they blocked CBS's requests for samples of the
swine flu cases and added obstacles to getting information. Despite the many
dangers that have since been linked to the hastily developed vaccine—including
the confirmed link to narcolepsy—the H1N1 vaccine is now part and parcel of
the "regular" seasonal flu vaccine, although most people are completely
unaware of this fact. And the CDC is now, for the first time ever, urging the
seasonal flu vaccine on everyone in the country, from six months' of age until
death.

>> Even more disturbing, the CDC withheld data on miscarriages from the H1N1
vaccines under Gerberding's lead, while insisting that pregnant women be put
first in line to receive it._

But you've been told that "anti-vaxxers" are a bunch of conspiracy loonies, so
you should just keep laughing and sneering at them, yes?

~~~
maus42
Well, Pandemrix was never used in US.

The mechanism of narcolepsy was quite interesting. Note that it was linked to
surface proteins of the virus itself:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine-
hel...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine-helps-
unravel-complex-causes-of-narcolepsy/)

The fact that GSK vaccine managed to replicate exactly those surface proteins
exactly that way (I guess better than the virus itself?) was quite unlucky.
Maybe that could have been caught in more extensive clinical trials (I don't
know).

