At that point a clinical trial began with 52 volunteers. "We saw a robust immune response following a single dose of the vaccine, which could be particularly useful in outbreak interventions," Col. Stephen Thomas, WRAIR's Deputy Commander and senior author, noted in a paper on the trial that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The vaccine was initially developed starting in 2000 by researchers from the Public Health Agency of Canada. It was licensed to a subsidiary of NewLink Genetics Corporation. As Toronto Metro's writer Genna Buck noted, out of this tragic outbreak some good came, if only in the recognition that steps must be taken, such as this effort by Gavi, to ensure that adequate stockpiles of vaccine for deadly diseases are available.


"A good vaccine was sitting in a lab somewhere," she wrote. "By 2005 it was shown to confer strong Ebola immunity in monkeys. In jumpy, post-9/11 North America, there was a lot of funding for research on bioterrorism agents. The Canadian government licensed the vaccine to a small American drug developer, which never got around to human trials."

As director of the Wellcome Trust Dr. Jeremy Farrar noted in the Gavi statement about the vaccine deal that this time, at least, the lesson of better preparedness has struck home. “As we saw with the new confirmed case just last week, the Ebola epidemic is likely to have a long tail and it’s possible that several more isolated cases will emerge in the coming weeks and months. This vaccine, therefore, could still play an important role in containing any additional flare-ups of this outbreak, as well as being available to help prevent future epidemics.”

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