West Africa: Ebolanomics – the search for a vaccine

When Ebola hit West Africa last year, it was a disease with no sign of a vaccine or cure. To those affected that may have been an indication that the wider world didn’t care about them or the diseases that affected them, but in truth there has simply been no incentive for anyone to develop these therapies. Now pharmaceutical companies are racing to produce an effective vaccine, and on 23 January the British company Glaxo Smith Kline shipped the first 300 doses of its candidate to Liberia to start phase II trials. At an event in the UK Houses of Parliament to discuss the economics of developing such vaccines, Jon Pender, a vice president of GSK, said he had been surprised, in the circumstances, that companies had any possible candidates at all on their shelves which could be developed and tested. He challenged suggestions that this was just because Ebola epidemics happened...