US-funded Ebola facility faces protests as Kenya pushes ahead
A U.S.-funded Ebola isolation facility under construction in Kenya became the focus of protests after a court temporarily blocked the project pending a review of its potential health risks.
President William Ruto’s administration will build the facility at a U.S. Air Force base 125 miles north of the capital, Nairobi, the Health Ministry said in a statement. A Kenyan court last week ordered the government to reject the deal with the U.S. after a human-rights group said the plan posed “grave health risks” to the public.
The U.S. plans to treat its nationals at the installation after President Donald Trump’s administration said it’s seeking to “prevent the Ebola outbreak from reaching our shores.” American personnel who will run the 50-bed complex reached the Laikipia Air Base on Saturday, CNN reported, citing a U.S. government official.
“Protecting Kenyans requires more than hoping diseases do not cross our borders,” the ministry said in a statement over the weekend. “It requires a comprehensive approach that combines effective surveillance and border screening with strong preparedness and response systems before a crisis emerges, not after it has already taken hold.”
Hundreds of residents of Nanyuki, near Laikipia Air Base, marched waving Kenyan flags and called for the containment plans to be canceled, warning that they could expose the local community to the outbreak, The Star reported.
The U.S. is committing $13.5 million to Kenya’s Ebola preparedness and has sent 30 Public Health Service officers to support the 50-bed facility, it said last week. Some of them responded to an Ebola outbreak about 12 years ago.
An American doctor who contracted the disease in Congo was sent to Germany with his family for treatment last month.
Congo confirmed at least 321 cases and 48 deaths from the outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain as of Monday, according to a report by its National Institute of Public Health. The outbreak has spread to neighboring Uganda, where at least nine cases have been confirmed, with one death.
The World Health Organization has warned that the disease is outpacing the emergency response, exposing the strain on public-health systems in eastern Congo, where armed conflict, mass displacement and a distrust of authorities are complicating efforts to isolate patients and trace infections.
“The true scale of this Ebola outbreak is likely far worse than official figures suggest,” Rachel Howard, an adviser to the International Rescue Committee, said in a statement. “When four out of five contacts are not being traced, it becomes incredibly difficult to contain the outbreak or even understand its true scale.”
The African Development Bank is working with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO to assess how much the lender should deploy to support countries affected by the outbreak, AfDB President Sidi Ould Tah said in an interview last week.
Separately, the Africa CDC will offer $11 million to Burundi to help prevent Ebola from spreading in the nation, state-run TV said, citing Jean Kaseya, the agency’s director-general. Of the $500 million needed to fight the outbreak, funding pledges totaling about $290 million have been received so far, it said last week.
Moderna, other groups get $60M to develop vaccine
Global health organization CEPI will give roughly $60 million to Moderna and two other groups to accelerate the development of shots against Ebola Bundibugyo.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was one of the early investors that helped to develop a vaccine at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Richard Hatchett, head of CEPI, told Reuters on Monday it was possible to get Ebola Bundibugyo (BDBV) vaccines ready for trials within a couple of months.
There are currently no approved BDBV vaccines or treatments.
Hatchett said the promise of vaccines on “a not infinitely distant horizon” should help to start conversations about who would buy them and fund any roll-out.
But he cautioned that vaccine development can be unpredictable, and the challenging security situation in eastern Congo would make trials complex.
CEPI has committed up to $50 million to support preclinical and early clinical development of Moderna’s investigational BDBV vaccine candidate.
The funding would also support manufacturing and progression to later-stage trials if early data are positive, Moderna said.
“We have worked on Ebola in preclinical models showing great results,” Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel said in a telephone interview.
Given the lethality of Ebola, the aim would be to create a vaccine that prevents disease while attempting to simplify the dosing strategy, he said.
At this point, it’s not clear whether the vaccine could be given in one or two doses. That would be ironed out in the phase 1 trial before moving into larger trials, which he said would need to be done in Africa.
“Our goal is to move as fast as we can without compromising safety, and to be as helpful as we can,” he said.
CEPI said it would also invest up to $8.6 million for a shot developed by the University of Oxford and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, and an initial $3.2 million for a vaccine developed by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.
IAVI’s single-dose Bundibugyo vaccine candidate uses the same technology as Merck’s approved vaccine Ervebo for the Zaire strain, the first strain of Ebola to be discovered in what was then Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It has shown survival benefit in animal studies.
IAVI CEO Mark Feinberg said in a press briefing that it remains unclear which partners would be responsible for organizing or conducting clinical trials for the vaccine candidate.
He noted that multiple studies were carried out during the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, backed by U.S. agencies and the World Health Organization.
“We understand from the WHO more recently that they won’t be assuming that role in the future,” Feinberg said, adding it would require “tens of millions of dollars until we’re in a position to enter the clinic”.
The WHO did not immediately clarify its stance on sponsoring or conducting trials.
Oxford’s candidate, ChAdOx1 Bundibugyo, uses the same technology as that of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Hatchett said Oxford and Serum had demonstrated in a different outbreak last year - Rift Valley Fever in Mauritania and Senegal - that they could make doses ready for trial in around six weeks, far quicker than typical timescales that have in the past run to years.
Once a vaccine is developed, Hatchett said the next challenge is ensuring access to the shots where they are needed. He said 300,000 doses of Ervebo were needed to bring the 2018-2020 Ebola Zaire outbreak under control in a similar region of Congo.
Separately, global vaccine alliance Gavi on Friday committed up to $50 million to the Ebola response, and the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund announced up to $220.6 million in grants.
Brazil: 2 suspected Ebola cases tested negative
Brazil has cleared two suspected cases of Ebola after both patients tested negative for the virus, local authorities said on Monday.
The suspected cases emerged over the weekend from patients with related symptoms who had recently been in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
The patients in Brazil had tested positive for other diseases, but local authorities waited for Ebola test results to rule out the cases.
Brazil’s state of Sao Paulo said no genetic material of Ebola was found in the testing of a 37-year-old man who came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and who had already tested positive for meningitis.
In Rio de Janeiro, a patient who had recently traveled to Uganda also tested negative for Ebola, health research institute Fiocruz and the city hall said in separate statements. The patient had tested positive for malaria.
Bloomberg News writers Desire Nimubona, Jennifer Zabasajja, Kamailoudini Tagba and Moses Mozart Dzawu, along with Reuters reporters, contributed to this report.
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