The World Health Organization is urgently seeking volunteers for Ebola vaccine trials as the deadliest outbreak on record involving the Ebola Bundibugyo virus continues to spread in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The warning came Tuesday as researchers pushed ahead with experimental vaccines and treatments in Britain and Canada, underscoring just how high the stakes have become.
The W.H.O. says additional volunteers are needed as clinical experiments expand. Researchers are racing to determine whether several vaccine candidates can provide protection against the virus while health officials confront rising infections and deaths.
The effort is still in its early stages.
Potential treatments for Ebola Bundibugyo are currently being tested on ferrets and monkeys. Researchers will analyze those results as the first experimental therapies move toward human testing.
In Britain, the first of four vaccine candidates has entered clinical trials. The candidates are being developed through a collaboration involving biotechnology companies Moderna and Public Health Vaccines, the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the University of Oxford, according to the BMJ.
That development marks an important step—but it also highlights the uncomfortable reality of fighting a deadly virus with vaccines that are still experimental.
Scientists can test candidates in laboratories and animals. Eventually, however, researchers need human volunteers to determine whether those vaccines are safe and effective in people.
That is the point the W.H.O. is now emphasizing.
The situation in Congo has turned the search for answers into a race against time. Every new case gives researchers another reason to move quickly, while every delay risks allowing the outbreak to claim more lives.
For communities facing Ebola, this is not an abstract scientific exercise. It is a fight measured in hospital beds, frightened families, exhausted health workers and lives that cannot be recovered once they are lost.
The hope is that these trials can produce something the world desperately needs: a proven weapon against a virus capable of devastating communities with frightening speed.
But until the experimental vaccines and treatments clear the necessary scientific and clinical hurdles, there is no shortcut. The evidence has to come first, but after the reputational hit the W.H.O. has suffered for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be difficult for many to even trust the "data" they show us in the future.
