Abstract
An international vaccine-development fund could provide the resources and momentum to carry vaccines from their conception to their development and licensure — thereby helping to avert a repetition of the Ebola crisis.
As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continues, albeit at a much lower level than it reached in the spring, we still lack a vaccine that has been shown to be safe and effective. There has been no shortage of basic research: by 2009, at least seven Ebola vaccines had been tested in monkeys, with encouraging results.
1
But before the West African epidemic, only one of these vaccine candidates was tested in healthy humans, in phase 1 trials to evaluate its safety, and it was subsequently abandoned.
2
No vaccine had reached the later processes that would lead to licensure, and . . .