Canada will donate up to 1,000 experimental Ebola vaccine doses to WHO

RT: August 12, 2014

Canada has offered to donate its experimental Ebola virus vaccine to West African States after the WHO said it would be ethical to use untested vaccines to try and contain the outbreak that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHA) the country sees the vaccine as a global resource and is in talks with the US and the World Health Organization to coordinate the best application of a limited number of doses in its possession.

The deputy head of PHA Dr. Gregory Taylor estimates that Canada has about 1,500 doses of the vaccine, which has not yet been tested on people, saying that 1,000 doses of vaccine could be sent abroad for use, Canadian Press reports.

Taylor also warned that since the drug is yet to be tested on humans, it’s not clear what dosage is needed to protect a person, so those numbers could change.

Earlier on Tuesday, the WHO announced that experimental drugs can be used to treat patients but the scarcity of supplies raises questions who gets saved first.

“There was unanimous agreement among the experts that in the special circumstances of this Ebola outbreak it is ethical to offer unregistered interventions as potential treatments or prevention,” the WHO’s assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny said after an ethics panel published its guidance.

(read the full article at RT)

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