chat

lol I mentioned that just down the thread.

My understanding is that development was encouraged by the US military because they were worried about bio terrorism. The September 11 Never Forget anthrax attacks were not yet totally forgotten about. There was a case where a critically ill man flew to Texas(?) where he was admitted to hospital, staff didn't realize they needed to follow strict contact precautions, and a nurse contracted Ebola which she died of. As did the patient. It caused a panic because people realized Ebola may not be confined to "over there" and worried what if extremely sick Africans started coming to the US maliciously?? They could go to the mall or anything and infect all kinds of people. So it became salient to actually develop a vaccine to this disease because now white/wealthy people could be at risk. It became a a National Security issue and military $$$ got involved.

So researchers that had been toiling away for decades suddenly got an influx of money and attention. Since a lot of the groundwork was already done, they quickly developed a vaccine which was effective in humans. But when it came time to finalize the approvals by like filling in the forms, dotting the is, crossing the ts, doing the final study, resources were pulled. Americans weren't afraid of Bio Terrorism any more. Now that the problem was back to only affecting Black people in Africa it didn't seem to be a priority so who cares.

I remember hearing about this in the time between the development of the vaccine and its approval. Scientists saying "we have this, its ready to go!" Of course they are trying to court favor with people more powerful than themselves, not be firebrands, but the frustration was very clear.

In many ways the story is the same as the Lyme vaccine. Ebola is a way worse disease 10000x but why should we have any diseases?

And people think too many vaccines is the conspiracy. Hey everyone: it's too few vaccines.

(Not even starting about distribution.)