This picture taken on Monday Oct. 20 shows an information sheet and an antibacterial hand gel developed at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and offered by the Canadian government to the Geneva-based World Health Organization. Photo: Richard Juilliart/AFP/Getty Images Canada started shipments of Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization in Geneva on Monday for urgent trials in Africa, where scientists hope it will stop the outbreak in its tracks, but it’s a journey that has come too late for some experts.
“If this vaccine had been developed on time, probably people would be living now who are dead,” said Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa. “We don’t know, maybe it doesn’t work, but everyone seems to think it works. It’s way past due for trials. That’s for sure.”
Attaran said Canada should have acted sooner, cancelling a contract with the small American pharmaceutical company that bought the rights to develop the vaccine, and getting it to the people who need it, but the government says it was waiting for the World Health Organization and delays had nothing to do with the contract.
Scientists have been hopeful that the Canadian vaccine will work on Ebola like it did during the 2005 trials, when it protected all the monkeys injected with the virus at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
People from a community affected by Ebola virus receive food aid from World Food program in Monrovia, Liberia.(AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)
That research, conducted by the Public Health Agency of Canada, was published in Nature Medicine that year and in the Lancet in 2010. It took Health Canada until November 2013 to get a large batch of the vaccine manufactured, but it’s still not approved for use in West Africa, where experts project the epidemic, if unchecked, will take 1.5 million lives by the end of January.
In the House of Commons on Monday, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper about the delays.
“What action is the government taking to make sure this vaccine is in the hands of a company capable of getting it to those who so desperately need it right away?” he said.
Harper said Mulcair had his facts wrong.
“It was not a matter of rights that was delaying that vaccine being deployed,” he said. “It was a decision by the World Health Organization. Obviously, we are pleased to see the WHO is now acting.”
Frank Plummer, former head of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said the vaccine could have been ready sooner but nobody saw this outbreak coming.
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the situation where you’d be needing to vaccinate large numbers of people,” he said last week. “The idea was much more controlling a small outbreak. The whole thing has changed so much with this catastrophe.”
Canada tried and failed to get big pharmaceutical companies interested in the vaccine, Plummer said. Scientists say an Ebola vaccine didn’t look like a profitable undertaking.
Plummer said that strict vaccine-development rules required the Public Health Agency to get vaccine doses manufactured according to a higher standard, and that took time.
“We would have happily gone on to clinical trial if we had something that was clinical grade material but nobody would approve us using that material in humans,” he said.
A vaccine candidate, in a vial, that will be used in human Ebola trials.(AP Photo/NIAID/GSK)
Plummer, who left the laboratory in March, doesn’t know why it took so long for trials to get started.
The first 40 volunteers weren’t injected until last week, at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md.
That should have happened more quickly, said Attaran.
“Any time after January you could have gone into clinical trials,” he said Monday. “And that hasn’t been done as of October. The vaccine had been waiting for almost a year before it got into trials, coinciding with the 10 months of the worst epidemic ever. I don’t know what the Public Health Agency was thinking.”
The Public Health Agency says it has acted quickly. Last week Health Minister Rona Ambrose said that trials proceeded at “unprecedented speed,” but scientists have been frustrated.
Heinz Feldmann, who developed the vaccine, complained angrily last month.
“It’s a farce; these doses are lying around there while people are dying in Africa,” he told Science Magazine.
Scientists have raised questions about NewLink Genetics, the company that bought the rights to the vaccine for $200,000 from Health Canada in 2010.
It’s not clear what NewLink, a small firm specializing in cancer treatments, has done with the rights since it signed that contract, and the company did not respond to requests for information.
Health workers wearing protective gear go to remove the body of a person who is believed to have died after contracting the Ebola virus. (CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Abbas Dulleh)
Science Magazine reported that NewLink, which specializes in cancer drugs, was slow to provide the information needed to start trials.
Attaran has called on Canada to withdraw the rights, as is allowed for in the contract, and hand them to a bigger company with more experience in vaccine development.
NewLink CEO Charles Link told the Wall Street Journal that his team has “been working nights and weekends since the Ebola crisis exploded.”
Attaran says that Health Canada ought to have acted more quickly from the beginning.
He points to a 2009 paper by Health Canada scientists that called an Ebola vaccine an “urgently required tool.” A 2009 DND study — The Future Security Environment — warned of the risk that Ebola and similar diseases “will be spread around the world in short periods of time.”
“They certainly did not act with all appropriate speed,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
- Risk Ebola will reach Canada increases the longer the outbreak persists: Study
If Canada’s vaccine were ready, health workers could be vaccinated before going into affected areas and conduct “ring vaccinations” of at-risk populations.
American scientist Tom Geisbert, who conducted the monkey trials in 2005, said in an interview last week that he is hopeful the vaccine will eventually help stop Ebola.
“It works really quickly, which in an outbreak is hugely important,” he said. “If you’re going to put somebody and send them to Africa, it would be great to vaccinate them and know that your vaccine worked shortly after they got there. Well, heck, this vaccine works in some cases even after you’re exposed.”
Animal tests show that the vaccine will likely protect many people if they are immunized after they are infected.
“The situation where you know people have been exposed to somebody that was infected, it would be great to vaccinate everybody who was in contact with that person,” says Geisbert.
Canada paid $877,000 to a Germany company — IDT Biologika GmbH — to manufacture 1,500 vials of vaccine. Since January they’ve been stored at minus 80 at the lab in Winnipeg.
A small number have been sent to Maryland for the tests down there. Canada will retain roughly 500 vials for use in Canada.
smaher@postmedia.com
@stphnmaher
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