The authors report that vaccine efficacy was 100 percent (95% confidence interval: 74.7 – 100%; p=0.0036) following vaccination with a single dose of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine.
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World Health Organization (WHO) said the findings could be a “game-changer”.
The World Health Organization announced Friday that an Ebola vaccine has shown great promise in halting the spread of the deadly virus during a clinical trial in Guinea.
“This is an extremely promising development”, Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said in an agency news release.
VSV-ZEBOV may become the first licensed vaccine against the disease for which there is also no approved treatment or cure.
A new Ebola vaccine is being called “highly effective” following a small study in Guinea, West Africa. The next immediate step, they say, is to continue the trial and vaccinate more people. The British medical journal Lancet has Lancet published preliminary results and analyses.
Sixteen of them contracted the virus while unprotected, said the study, but by day six after inoculation, everyone in the second group was also fully shielded.
“Had this vaccine been available a year ago, I think it had the potential to save literally thousands of lives”, Simor said.
According to interim results from an experimental study, experts are saying that this could be the breakthrough cure for Ebola. Could this be the vaccine that will stop the Ebola outbreak?
The trial saw 4123 high-risk people in Guinea vaccinated immediately after someone close to the trial participant fell ill with the haemorrhagic fever.
“This new vaccine, if the results hold up, may be the silver bullet against Ebola, helping to bring the current outbreak to zero and to control future outbreaks of this kind”, the foreign minister of Norway Børge Brende said Friday.
Since May 2014, 11,000 people have been killed by the Ebola Virus.
“These communities need an effective vaccine sooner rather than later”, Gavi’s chief executive Seth Berkley said. Neighbors, friends and family members of patients diagnosed with Ebola were vaccinated for making their immune system strong enough to evade the virus.
Researchers have been using a “ring” strategy – based on that used in smallpox eradication – to trial the vaccine’s effectiveness.
There were no proven drugs or vaccines against the virus at the start of the largest outbreak of Ebola in history, which began in Guinea in December 2013.
In the trial, researchers vaccinated anyone in the close circle of contacts of a newly infected person, targeting those most likely to get the disease after a new case.
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Such a permit would enable production of the vaccine for future Ebola epidemics.
