According to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), “the National Institutes of Health has been developing an Ebola vaccine for several years that has had encouraging results in primates.”
Fauci is involved in a push for a fast track with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that a human trial for a vaccine to preempt an outbreak of Ebola is conducted.
The target date is September for “phase 1 clinical trial” for the purpose of studying the “safety and some efficacy” of a new drug that will be marketed to the general public.
Fauci explained that: “Results from the study should be available by January. If the vaccine proves safe and effective, it could be given to health workers in affected African countries sometime in 2015. We are starting to discuss some deals with pharmaceutical companies to help scale it up, so on an emergency basis, it might be available in 2015 for health workers who are putting themselves at extreme risk.”
On July 31, 2014, President Obama amended Section 1(b) of Executive Order (EO) 13295 entitled, “Revised List of Quarantinable Communicable Diseases”, written by former president George W. Bush.
The original EO stated in Section 1: “Based upon the recommendation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the “Secretary”), in consultation with the Surgeon General, and for the purpose of specifying certain communicable diseases for regulations providing for the apprehension, detention, or conditional release of individuals to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of suspected communicable diseases, the following communicable diseases are hereby specified pursuant to section 361(b) of the Public Health Service Act:
Cholera; Diphtheria; infectious Tuberculosis; Plague; Smallpox; Yellow Fever; and Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers (Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Crimean-Congo, South American, and others not yet isolated or named).
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which is a disease associated with fever and signs and symptoms of pneumonia or other respiratory illness, is transmitted from person to person predominantly by the aerosolized or droplet route, and, if spread in the population, would have severe public health consequences.”
Obama’s change to section 1(b) is as follows: ” Severe acute respiratory syndromes, which are diseases that are associated with fever and signs and symptoms of pneumonia or other respiratory illness, are capable of being transmitted from person to person, and that either are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic, or, upon infection, are highly likely to cause mortality or serious morbidity if not properly controlled. This subsection does not apply to influenza.”
This alteration to EO 13295 comes just days before “two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia” will arrive in Atlanta, Georgia and taken to Dobbins Air Force base just outside the Atlanta metro area.
An unidentified spokeswoman for the US State Department was quoted in the media as saying: “Every precaution is being taken to move the patients safely and securely, to provide critical care en route on a noncommercial aircraft, and to maintain strict isolation upon arrival.”
The US State Department is working in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to coordinate the arrival of these Ebola victims to the US for treatment.
One of the facilities where the two Americans will be treated is Emory University Hospital (EUH) because it “houses a specially built isolation unit equipped to treat patients exposed to deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola.”
Bruce Ribner, head of the special unit at EUH said: “The 12-year-old unit, developed in collaboration with the CDC, which is right down the road, previously treated a patient with SARS, which swept through multiple countries in 2003. The unit is separate from other patient areas, and its staff is highly trained.”
Ribner explained: “We can deliver a substantially higher level of care, a substantially higher level of support, to optimize the likelihood that those patients will survive this episode.”
Since February of this year, the Ebola outbreak has spread from Guinea to Sierra Leone and Liberia.
An estimated 1,323 people have been infected and 729 have died from the virus.
Richard Wenzel, infectious disease specialist and emeritus professor of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) commented: “The risk is low, but it’s not zero in terms of transmission … [however] all of the bodily fluids are highly infectious.”
In 2012, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) conducted a study on how Eloba is transmitted.
The researchers showed “pigs infected with this form of Ebola can pass the disease on to macaques without any direct contact between the species.”
Gary Kobinger, scientist from the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) for the Public Health Agency of Canada explained: “What we suspect is happening is large droplets – they can stay in the air, but not long, they don’t go far. But they can be absorbed in the airway and this is how the infection starts, and this is what we think, because we saw a lot of evidence in the lungs of the non-human primates that the virus got in that way.”
Overseen by the US Department of Defense (DoD) under the Transformational Medical Technologies program (TMT) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have spent millions of dollars conducting scientific research into the Ebola virus and its potential to be turned into a bio-weapon and potential vaccine efforts through Massachusetts-based Sarepta Therapeutics and Tekmira Pharmaceuticals of Canada .
Soon after the project began, the funding was abruptly cut.
The TMT creates relationships with private sector biotech firms, pharmaceutical corporations and academic institutions, as well as other government agencies to advance biological warfare, research viral and biological weapons and estimate threat levels of all biological agents based on ability to infect and effectiveness of devastation.
The DoD suddenly stopped funding Ebola vaccine research through these two corporations due to financial constraints.
Larry Zeitlin, president of Mapp Biophamracueticals commented: “With the sporadic nature of Ebola outbreaks, combined with the absolute deadly nature of the virus makes it a hard sell to large pharmaceutical corporations because it isn’t a huge customer base and big pharma is obviously interested in big profits. So these niche products which are important for biodefense are really driven by small companies.”
The Ebola virus mysteriously appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1976 and has sporadically reappeared in the area without explanation ever since.
It is believed that eating monkeys who are infected with Ebola was the initial mode of transmission. However this is accepted speculation because the scientific community agrees that the natural reservoir of the virus is unknown and therefore knowledge of transmission is only hypothesized.
In 2012, a sudden outbreak of the Ebola virus surfaced, killing 14 people. The World Health Organization (WHO), the CDC and Uganda’s Ministry of Health came together to control the unexpected eruption.
Dr. Paul Roddy, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a French charity, asserts that the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Uganda has been stabilized, however an additional outbreak could erupt in another location.
Roddy speculated that natives eating bush-meat were the catalyst for spread. He assumes that monkeys who have eaten infected bats, that were then consumed by Ugandans was the chain of infection.
Eight days later, in the DRC, a new strain of the Ebola virus has surfaced according to medical volunteers from MSF. It is not the same strain as was discovered in Uganda.
Back in April, locals in Guinea shut down an Ebola virus treatment center established by DWB because they believe that the organization has been infecting local populations with Ebola.
Local government allowed DWB to set up camps with 60 international field workers to treat the Ebola break out that has ravaged Guinea.
Bart Janssens, director of operations for DWB was warning the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is “totally out of control” and there is a strong need for “international organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and to increase the public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease.”
Janssens said: “The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave. And, for me, it is totally out of control. I’m absolutely convinced that this epidemic is far from over and will continue to kill a considerable amount of people, so this will definitely end up the biggest ever.”
DWB is pushing for “a real political commitment that this is a very big emergency. Otherwise, it will continue to spread, and for sure it will spread to more countries.”
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