The Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is finally waning, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 18 October. The good news came as a vaccine that has helped to contain the virus’s spread moved a step closer to regulatory approval.

Fifty people were diagnosed with Ebola in the DRC between 25 September and 15 October, the WHO said. At the outbreak’s peak in April, roughly 300 new infections were reported in three weeks. Since the outbreak began in August 2018, almost 3,250 people have been infected and more than 2,150 have died.

But the drop in infections is not a reason to relax efforts to contain the virus, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on 18 October. “We must treat every case as if it is the first since every case has the potential to spark a new outbreak,” he said.

Ebola responders have pushed the virus out of Beni, a city in the DRC’s North Kivu province that has been a centre of the outbreak. But the WHO still considers the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern. Ebola is continuing to spread in remote parts of North Kivu and Ituri provinces, where violence has complicated the fight against Ebola.

An independent emergency committee of health experts that advises the WHO will convene again in three months to decide whether the crisis still merits the public-health-emergency designation.

Green light for vaccine

There was more good news on 18 October, when the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended that the European Commission (EC) approve an Ebola vaccine produced by the pharmaceutical company Merck.

About 240,000 people considered to be at risk from Ebola have been vaccinated with Merck’s vaccine during the DRC outbreak, but the vaccine is still considered to be an experimental product by regulators worldwide and cannot be marketed. Most Ebola specialists agree that the outbreak would have been much worse without the vaccine.

The EC will make a decision within 10 weeks on whether to approve the vaccine for sale. The EC typically follows the counsel of the EMA.

The US Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked the vaccine’s application for approval in September. Its decision is expected in March 2020. Seven other experimental Ebola vaccines are at earlier stages of development.

3 thoughts on “Can A Vaccine Stop Ebola?”
  1. What a load of nonsense!
    Let us begin with the first problem:
    There is no hard evidence that viruses even exist let alone proof that they cause disease. In a test case before Germany’s highest court in December 2016, the judges ruled that hypotheses, assumptions and guesswork are not evidence and that no evidence proving the existence of a virus had been presented. In point of fact, the virus hypothesis was invented by a Dutch botanist in 1893 and, since then, no supporting evidence has been found. All of the pictures which you may have seen purporting to be of the Ebola virus are, in fact, nothing other than artists impressions of what the putative virus might look like, i.e. they’re photoshopped!

    This, of course, leads to the second problem:
    If a common cause virus is not found then what does cause Ebola?
    We can answer this quite easily by looking at the European Black Death in the 14th century.
    The symptoms of Black Death are indistinguishable from those of Ebola, i.e. they are, with a very high degree of probability, one and the same dis-ease.
    Exhumed Black Death mass-graves show that almost all victims had been severely malnourished for many years – this was caused by the onset of the Little Ice Age which drastically reduced food crop production.
    Those few who, apparently, contracted Ebola by visiting the area recovered by being given massive doses of minerals.
    Severe mineral deficiency will cause the break-down of the collagen proteins which hold the cells of your body together. This causes dark patches just under the skin where deoxygenated blood from the burst cells has gathered – hence the name “Black Death”. As more collagen is destroyed, the body literally falls to pieces and, as we see with Ebola, can even explode as the skin becomes incapable of holding the internal pressure of your blood.

    So, Ebola has nothing to do with any sort of putative micro-organism but with chronic malnutrition. This is so cheap to correct that the pharmaceutical cartel has even tried to have it banned. Cost is about 50 cents per week over 4 – 6 months!
    That’s why you’re told the Ebola fairy tale instead of the truth.

    Blessed be

    Karma Singh

  2. The above is a load of male bovine excrement-read that as FAKE. The hallmark of good science, is repeatability and testability. Let’s test Mr. Singh’s hypothesis: Namely, that visurses do not exist and do not cause disease. We will spray some sputum from an Ebola victim in his nose and sit back and observe. Since we can assume that Mr. Singh is well nourished with plenty of minerals, he should not develop Ebola. In short order, we will be rid of another science denier. End of test.

    Also, the Black Death was caused by a bacterium, Y. pestis, not by a virus. OH, and by the way, since viruses do not exist, then all the deaths from AIDS are completely unexplainable, according to Singh. Every time you get a common cold, you feel the effects of a virus. But of course, the runny nose, the fever, the sneezing(which spreads the virus), and all that does not exist.

    Millions of very well educated scientists are certain the viruses and bacteria exist. They can be seen via an electron scanning microscope. Remember, PhotoShop did not exist until just recently, long after electron microscope pictures of viruses where made. The effects of these disease agents and how to stop them have been studied for years by the most able of doctors and scientists from Louis Pasteur onward. The lives of millions of people have saved by these heroic efforts.

    1. Well, well, well Mr. Anonymous. It’s time for your lessons in science and history:-

      1) Your spray “experiment” would prove absolutely nothing either way because there are so many variables present that no conclusion could be drawn. Your test fails the rigorousness of the Scientific Method.

      2. To date there has been no concrete evidence that viruses exist. The electron microscope can show particles that normal optical microscopes can’t with the major disadvantage that the electron microscope can only show dead material in grey scale -never in colour. All colour pictures purporting to be of viruses are, therefore, artists’ impressions and not actual photos. The claim that these particles are viruses rests alone upon the wishful thinking of the pseudo-scientists desperate to prove viruses who simply “ex cathedra” declared these still unknown particles to be viruses. To date there has been no evidence presented which would confirm this claim. To the contrary, more modern tools such as the somatoscope which could show living viruses have found no evidence of their existence.

      3. Some hundreds of years before the existence of bacteria was first hypothesised and before microscopes capable of showing them existed, where do you get your certainty that the Black Death was caused by Yersinia Pestis – a bacterium which may have been a side effect of bubonic plague (which is caused by inappropriate diet and absence of sanitation). The symptoms of the plague and the Black Death / Ebola have no similarity and the hypothesis that Y. Pestis was involved with the Black Death is, therefore, fatally flawed.

      4. AIDS, as Dr. Bergman at Columbia State showed incontrovertibly in the 1980’s, is an expression of extreme chronic stress having nothing whatsoever to do with the putative HIV or any other micro-organism. Following Dr. Bergman’s advice, those who work successfully with AIDS treat it as extreme stress and, usually, manage to resolve it. Statistically, your hypothesis does not hold water as only around half of those actually ill with AIDS test positive for HIV. The overwhelming majority of the HIV positive never develop AIDS. 20% of them test HIV negative within 2 years.

      5. A cold is a detoxification of “yin” materials such as sugar, white wheat and cow dairy produce. This happens mostly at the start of Winter as the body needs to eject these cooling substances in order to maintain heat for the cold months. There is also an emotional aspect but I won’t go into this here as I see that you are already intellectually overstreched.

      6. Throughout history, millions have people have believed things which proved to be total nonsense. The numbers who believe it has no relationship to or effect upon its veracity: Look how many believe that there is an unusual climate change going on and that the tiny amount of CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere is the cause!

      7. Pasteur and his partner in crime, Robert Koch, knew at the time that his postulate was nonsense: Not only did his professor, Pierre Bechamp, tell him so, even his own experiments showed him that it is untrue. According to Pasteur’s will, following the death of his last child, his notebooks were unsealed and it was read how he freely admitted that he had falsified many of his results to support his hypothesis whereby the actual results proved it to be untrue.

      Blessed be

      Karma Singh

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