alternatehistory.com

So it appears that there is now a 100% effective ebola vaccine that has passed trials and now is being put into full production for vaccination of all at risk individuals in Guinea (and presumably also at risk areas in the rest of West Africa)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/31/ebola-vaccine-trial-proves-100-successful-in-guinea

The development and testing of this vaccine seemed to have been quite fast, likely because of huge amount of international collaboration behind it: the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine was created by the public health agency of Canada (which holds the patent), then licensed for production in the US to a small company (NewLink Genetics) prior to the Ebola epidemic, after the outbreak production was ramped up by licensing out production to Merk. The US National institute of infectious disease then did the initial phase 1 clinical trials, and when they were successful the WHO began extensive "ring" clinical trials (initially using 800 doses from the Public Health Agency of Canada). This effort involved laboratories and agencies from Switzerland, the UK and Norway.

So what I am wondering, is now that we know the timeline for how long it would take to effectively test and set up mass production lines for a successful ebola vaccine, how do you think the situation would have developed if a major ebola epidemic had spread to Europe or North America from Africa (I know the odds of this were really long, but it was not impossible)? How much faster could the Western governments have rushed the production and testing of the Canadian Vaccine (as far as i can remember the Canadian government only ever had a couple thousand doses on hand, and they didn't even know if it would work)?

So anyone here have an idea about how a Western ebola outbreak would play out, and how much damage it would do before we had a vaccine produced, tested and distributed to the general population?
Top