Vaccine trial won’t cause Ebola - WHO
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has assured Ghanaians that the proposed Ebola vaccine trial will not cause Ebola in the country.
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WHO says it views the safety of people as paramount and would, therefore, not overlook any wrongdoing in the development of a vaccine.
The WHO Country Representative, Dr Magda Robalo, gave the assurance at a public sensitisation forum in Accra last Thursday.
“We have a generational opportunity to stop an outbreak which has been around for over 40 years and there shall be no wrongdoing under our watch,” she stated.
She said currently there were 10 vaccines on trial and WHO would continue to monitor them to ensure that developers followed laid down procedures.
Dr Robalo commended Ghana for the work so far done on Ebola and described the debate on the vaccine trial in the country as healthy, as people had the right to know what was going on.
Corroboration
The Foundation Vice-Chancellor of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho, Professor Fred N. Binka, for his part debunked speculations by a section of the public that Ebola was being introduced into the country.
He said the Ebola vaccine clinical trial to be conducted in the country could not cause Ebola.
Professor Binka said no vaccine had been brought into the country yet and corroborated the assurance that the trial would not put anybody at risk of contracting the Ebola virus should it be conducted in the country.
Time is now
He said the time for the vaccine to be tried was now, since in the next 12 months, there might not be any Ebola patient who could be used to test the potency of the vaccine. That, he explained, would be adverse in the event of another outbreak, as the processes for the search of a vaccine would have to be started.
He said the vaccine, therefore, needed to get out of the second phase so that the third phase would use Ebola patients from the affected countries.
Correcting the erroneous impression that the Ebola vaccine was a virus, Prof. Binka said the strain which was to be used could not replicate itself.
He said currently the vaccine trial, which needed 72 participants from Ghana and Kenya, only required 12 volunteers from Ghana, as Kenya had already recruited 60 people.
Developments on Ebola vaccine trial
Recently, following public agitations, the Minister of Health, Mr Alex Segbefia, called for more consultation on the proposed Ebola vaccine trial which was to be undertaken at Hohoe in the Volta Region.
Parliament also condemned moves to undertake the Ebola vaccine trial and summoned the Minister of Health to appear before it to answer questions on the vaccine trial.
A researcher at the Kintampo Research Centre, Dr Kwaku Poku-Asante, in response to some concerns raised by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences which had also asked for the vaccine trial to be stopped, said the first phase of the trial had already been conducted in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Mali and Switzerland.
According to him, the second phase which Ghana was to participate in was to use the GSK/NIH vaccine being developed from a gene particle to the species of the Zaire Ebola virus, rather than the gene particle of the Makona strain isolated in the epidemic in Guinea.
He said the Zaire strain was reported in the scientific journals as the main strain which caused the epidemic in all the countries in the West Africa region.
Dr Poku-Asante said pre-clinical studies in primates had shown safety and immunogenic after challenge studies, adding that high protection was achieved after challenging the animals with a very high dose, more than what is believed to be responsible for infections in the current outbreak.
The next stage, he said, was to evaluate safety, tolerability, immunogenicity and efficacy in humans, adding that “these studies would have to demonstrate a public health benefit else the vaccine would not be licensed”.