Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 385, Issue 9981, 16–22 May 2015, Pages 1933-1934
The Lancet

World Report
Ebola vaccine trial in west Africa faces criticism

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60938-2Get rights and content

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NIH trial

On May 13, at a Paris meeting that Grais calls “the big pow-wow”, those groups will meet with Clifford Lane, deputy director of the US National Institutes of Health's Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is expected to propose a third vaccine trial for Guinea: a randomised controlled trial that has already started in Liberia, pitting the Merck vaccine against the GlaxoSmithKline cAd3-EBOZ vaccine.

WHO Assistant Director General Marie-Paule Kieny opposes the expansion of the NIH

Protecting participants

But battling a high-profile US science project is only one of several issues that the WHO trial faces. It is receiving criticism from anthropologists and others in Guinea for how it protects volunteers who are vaccinated and develop fever, a known side-effect of the Merck vaccine, and for its reliance on an Ebola treatment centre that might not be able to provide the level of care required for clinical trial participants.

The rVSV-EBOV vaccine was proven safe in human safety trials at multiple

Concern over Coyah

Vinh-Kim Nguyen, a medical anthropologist at Université de Montréal, has been working in Guinea and raised further questions about safety in the ring trial after spending time in April at one of the Ebola treatment units where trial participants are taken if they become ill, the centre in Coyah, about 50 km from the capital of Conakry. Unlike most Ebola treatment units, which are run by MSF, the Red Cross, and other international agencies, the Guinean Government runs the Coyah unit, with

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