Opinion: The public science behind the ‘Merck’ Ebola vaccine
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved an important vaccine against Ebola, five years after an epidemic in West Africa killed 11,310 people and after more than 2,200 have died of it in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last 18 months.
Alex Azar, who heads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, quickly congratulated his department’s funding and “American global health leadership” for the vaccine, which is called Ervebo. As recently detailed in STAT, the reality is quite different: Canadian public institutions and funding outside the United States were primarily responsible for the vaccine. Without the work of one Canadian government laboratory in particular, more lives would surely have been lost.
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