UK starts first vaccine trial, eight weeks into Ebola emergency
The Oxford Covid vaccine is estimated to have saved six million lives in its first year of use worldwide, and hundreds of millions of doses have been received.
But the vaccine’s use has also been restricted in some countries due to rare blood clots affecting one in 100,000 people.
It is possible that this vaccine carries the same risk; but this is much lower than the threat from the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which kills about a third of those infected.
Pollock said serious side effects were “very rare” and that they had thought “very deeply” about the results of trials on healthy people and that any risks would be communicated to volunteers.
“I want to emphasize that the Covid AstraZeneca vaccine has been given safely to millions of people,” he added.
There are three other vaccines in development for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola.
These include one from biotech company Moderna, which uses mRNA vaccine technology. The US-based International Assistance Vaccine Initiative and Public Health Vaccines are using the technique, which has proven to work for another strain of Ebola but is slower to produce.
