The Future

There is a vaccine for ebola that works extremely well

A trial started in Guinea in 2015 finds it is 100 percent effective.

The Future

There is a vaccine for ebola that works extremely well

A trial started in Guinea in 2015 finds it is 100 percent effective.
The Future

There is a vaccine for ebola that works extremely well

A trial started in Guinea in 2015 finds it is 100 percent effective.

A trial begun in Guinea, which saw nearly 3,000 deaths during the ebola epidemic (which killed more than 11,000 people overall), has concluded and published results that a vaccine for ebola was 100 percent effective.

The trial began in March 2015; in July 2015 interim results published in Lancet suggested that the vaccine was indeed extremely effective. The final report, just published (again in Lancet) concludes that in a study of about 10,000 healthy people, 5,837 people got the vaccine immediately after contact with an infected individual and none of them contracted ebola. Of the remaining subjects, who delayed getting the vaccine by 10 days, 23 did contract the virus. The vaccine, the BBC reports, is expected to be fast-tracked for approval, and the World Health Organization says it could be available by 2018.

Interestingly, the vaccine was tested using a process called a "ring vaccination," which was used to control smallpox until its eradication in the late 1970s. The process involves vaccinating and monitoring all the people who come in close and common contact with an infected individual, creating a protective ring around the person to stop transmission.

The vaccine, VSV-EBOV, was developed in Canada in 2003. Though the vaccine is owned and patented by the Public Health Agency of Canada, the rights have been licensed to pharmaceutical giant Merck. The trial, which was called "Ebola ça Suffit" ("Ebola, that's enough" in French), was led by the World Health Organization, the Ministry of Health in Guinea, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and Medecins sans Frontieres.

Though the trial showed that none of the vaccinated people got the ebola virus, no vaccine is ever actually 100 percent effective outside of trials. However, this result is likely to help prevent another outbreak of the virus in the coming years. There are other vaccines for the virus still in testing, as well as one for a strain that emerged in Sudan.