Aug. 27, 2015
Thanks to a decade of federal assistance, several Ebola vaccine candidates were in the pipeline in 2014. Even so, the dollars directed toward Ebola were inadequate to develop vaccines that were outbreak ready. Few had made the leap from the lab into human trials. As a consequence, West Africa lost precious months last winter to preliminary safety tests. Ideally, these Phase 1 trials would have been done in advance so candidates could have been tested for efficacy soon after cases began to appear in March 2014.