Study Finds That Vaccine Instead of Ebola Made Doctor Sick
Study Finds That Vaccine Instead of Ebola Made Doctor Sick – Just 12 hours after he got an experimental Ebola vaccine, and just two days after he stuck himself with a needle while caring for Ebola patients in September, Dr. Lewis Rubinson started getting sick. By then, Rubinson was aboard a jet, being evacuated from Sierra Leone to the United States.
Rubinson wasn’t sure if he was infected with Ebola or if the vaccine was causing a reaction. He was en route to strict isolation at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington D.C.
Months later, it’s fairly clear the vaccine caused the reaction. He has no trace of Ebola infection. What’s not entirely clear is whether the vaccine stopped the virus from taking hold, or whether he was never infected in the first place. They could have been symptoms of Ebola, or from the vaccine, which is made using a “live” virus called vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) genetically engineered to carry a small, non-infectious piece of Ebola virus. By design, the vaccine causes a mild infection that activates the immune system and helps it recognize Ebola.
Geisbert, who helped test the vaccine, says one person’s case doesn’t offer a lot of information about how the vaccine will work.
“It shows that there was a robust immune response against the vaccine in one person,” said Geisbert, who wrote a commentary in JAMA about the study.
More importantly, the incident shows just how important it is to develop vaccines against diseases such as Ebola. Researchers had been working on one for years, but development had not gone far because of a lack of funding. Geisbert hopes the Ebola epidemic will spur work on this and other vaccines, as well as drugs. For an illness that’s not especially common or life-threatening — think many childhood vaccines — a killed virus is an obvious choice. But for Ebola, with a death rate approaching 70 percent, Geisbert argues a live vaccine is far better.
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