(CNN) -- The "extraordinary" rush to develop an
Ebola vaccine is moving forward apace, the lead researcher told CNN's
Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday, adding that the fast pace may engender
ethical concerns about how it the vaccine is eventually implemented.
"This is, frankly,
extraordinary," Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University
said. "We are trying to do in a few months something that might
typically take 10 years. We've had accelerated reviews of all our
applications, regulatory and ethical approvals, and so on."
"And we're now trying to
proceed so quickly that if things go well, by the end of the year, this
vaccine might actually be being used in the three affected countries in
West Africa."
He said that the vaccine
has been shown to be "really quite remarkably protective" in studies on
monkeys at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S.Researchers are under
tremendous pressure to develop a vaccine, as over 3,400 people have died
in West Africa and a Spanish nurse's assistant was confirmed on Monday
to be the first person to have contracted the virus outside of Africa.
But even if researchers
are able to make enough vaccine, and have data showing that it is safe
for use in humans and produces good immune responses, Hill said that
they will would not know that "it actually works."
"So we're going to have
to figure out a way of using the vaccine, and at the same time
evaluating it. And there's a great deal of discussion about how you
might do that now."Therein may lie ethical concerns.
There is little worry, he
said, about administering a vaccine to humans in a phase one trial, as
he said will begin this week in West Africa. The issue is what you do
after that.
"Once you've shown
safety in those individuals, do you go on to deploy the vaccine in a
very large population -- ideally of health-care workers who are at
greatest risk -- without knowing that the vaccine actually works?"
"Or instead, do you wait
several months -- maybe six months, maybe a year -- to prove absolutely
that the vaccine has a certain efficacy and then start thinking about
deploying it widely?"
"And if you wait that long, the epidemic might either be over, or the whole thing might be completely out of control."
"So that's the challenge -- to figure out what the best thing to do, given those conflicting priorities as I've described them."
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