When a virus moves faster than the people trying to stop it, doctors have to start guessing. Now, they are injecting thousands of people with a vaccine built for a different disease, just hoping it sticks.
You can have the best medical playbook in the world, but it falls apart when the virus you are fighting isn’t the one you prepared for. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a rare strain of Ebola is moving so fast that health workers are throwing out the old rules.
The current outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola. The standard Ervebo vaccine works well against the more common Zaïre strain, but nobody actually knows if it will stop this one.
The WHO says the virus is spreading across an area larger than France. Close to 2,500 people have died in just three months. Julien Harneis, the WHO’s Ebola co-ordinator, laid out the brutal math to reporters. Half of those deaths happened in just the last 20 days.
“It is growing faster and wider than the Ebola response,” he said.
The virus was likely spreading quietly since February. Early on, doctors misdiagnosed the fevers as malaria or typhoid. By the time they realized what it was, it was already deep in the villages.
Now, they are running a massive, desperate clinical trial. The WHO is sending 20,000 doses of Ervebo to test if it actually works against Bundibugyo. Another 50,000 doses are going straight into the arms of front-line health workers who cannot afford to wait for the lab results. The human cost is already staggering, with Save the Children reporting that at least 180 kids have lost both of their parents.
The physical geography makes it worse. The M23 rebel group controls chunks of North Kivu province. After two travelers tested positive in a rebel-held village, the militants suspended shared taxis and passenger boats between rebel and government zones for a month.
Tackling a highly contagious virus in the middle of an active war zone is a logistical nightmare. The checkpoints are controlled by men with guns, not doctors with thermometers.
The vaccines are in the coolers and the trial is starting. But as the infection map keeps expanding, the people on the ground know that hope is not a medical strategy.
