Ten years following the world’s deadliest outbreak of Ebola, treatments have been developed but these are not being made available to the people, often the poorest in the world, who need them most.
The first Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. First transmitted to people from wild animals like forest antelope, chimpanzees and fruit bats, Ebola Virus Disease spreads through the human population via person-to-person contact and it has a fatality rate of up to 90 percent.
Calling for urgent action is the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The medical body warns that, while two treatments now exist against the virus, these medications are still not readily available.
The paucity of medicines extends to countries where Ebola is endemic. This is because, MSF states, Ebola treatments remain under the control of just two US pharmaceutical corporations: Regeneron and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
The two treatments were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2020, after more than $800 million in taxpayer funding and other contributions from affected country governments, NGOs, and academic institutions—which hosted or facilitated clinical trials—as well as patients and survivors who directly participated in testing the treatments. outbreak.
Furthermore, large stocks of these drugs are being kept in a U.S. stockpile for national security and biodefense purposes. This means, the treatments—REGN-EB3 (atoltivimab/maftivimab/odesivimab), marketed by Regeneron as Inmazeb, and mAb114 (ansuvimab), marketed by Ridgeback as Ebanga—remain largely inaccessible to the people who need them.
To address the situation, MSF is calling for the establishment of an international emergency stockpile of treatments. MSF thinks this stockpile should be created and run by the International Coordinating Group (ICG) on Vaccine Provision.
The objective is to have a robust system in place for ensuring that treatments can always be provided at short notice to anyone, anywhere who needs them.
According to Dr. Armand Sprecher, public health specialist at MSF: “Now that there are effective antiviral treatments and vaccines, we can save lives, prevent illness, and control outbreaks, but only if these are fully available for the people who need them. That’s why we are calling for an emergency stockpile.”
Going forwards, to ensure treatments and preventive tools more widely available against dangerous pathogens, MSF considers that global access conditions must be attached early in the R&D process for medical tools developed with public money.
