3 November 2022 – Following the declaration of an Ebola outbreak in Uganda on 20 September 2022, the outbreak has now spread to seven districts (Kasanda, Kyegegwa, Bunyangabu and Kagadi districts beyond the original epicenter in Mubende district, and then to Kampala City and Wakiso).
The government-led response has activated the Incident Management System in order to control the outbreak. In support of the Ministry of Health-led efforts, CEPI, Gavi and WHO have outlined a plan to accelerate research during the outbreak, to ensure access to investigational doses, and to facilitate scaling up and access to any subsequently licensed vaccine.
Vaccination is usually one of the response interventions in such an outbreak, however, there are currently no licensed vaccines (or therapeutics) for Ebola disease caused by the Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV), though there are several candidate vaccines which appear to be suitable for evaluation in a clinical trial during this outbreak.
By embedding research at the heart of the outbreak response, we can achieve two goals: to evaluate potentially efficacious candidate vaccines and to potentially contribute to ending this outbreak, and protecting populations at risk in the future.
The Ministry of Health has designated the Makerere University Lung Institute to conduct vaccine and therapeutics clinical trials. The clinical trial to evaluate candidate vaccines against this ebolavirus is co-sponsored by the Ministry of Health in Uganda and WHO and involves support from partners. A Principal investigator from Makerere University Lung Institute will lead the vaccine trial.
WHO, CEPI and Gavi are providing support to ensure that sufficient doses of candidate vaccines are available for the trial and beyond. If sufficient doses can be made available, the aim of the vaccine trial would be to establish how effective the candidate vaccines are in diverse populations.
The vaccine developers and funders who will make the candidate vaccines available include the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, the Sabin Vaccine Institute and the US government institutions Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and MSD.
Moreover, there are other organisations committed to supporting the overall response, including Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), UNICEF, non-governmental organizations, donors, and regulators including the African Vaccine Regulatory Forum (AVAREF).
