Public health leaders who contained the Ebola epidemic make the case for COVID-19 vaccine technology transfer, open access vaccines for poor countries, and donation of funds and doses for vaccines.
FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE Thirty veterans from the public health response to the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak and over eighty other public health experts from around the world are calling on the World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO), to vote in its May 2021 meeting on propositions that would dramatically expand vaccine access in poor countries.
From May 24 to June 1, nations will convene at the World Health Assembly to make decisions about the global response to COVID-19. Signatories of the open letter argue that G20 and other wealthy countries must go beyond waiving patents for low-income countries to donate all of their excess doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries that have been outbid for vaccines. The letter rea
(Photo: Malaysia Atwater/The Stanford Daily).
on January 26, 2021
Four people who volunteered to be injected with coronavirus to increase the speed of vaccine trials advocated for the use of human challenge vaccine trials during a Tuesday event.
Volunteers Danica Marcos, Zacharia Kafuko, Aric Floyd and Seán McPartlin are members of 1Day Sooner, an organization that promotes the use of human challenge trials to speed up the deployment of effective COVID-19 vaccines. (The four haven’t been injected with coronavirus yet.)
In contrast to conventional trials that involve testing the effectiveness of a vaccine by giving half of the participants the vaccine and instructing them to live their lives as normal, human challenge trials involve injecting participants with the virus to study their reactions in comparison to a control group who has not been vaccinated. Human challenge trials accelerate development by allowing researchers to study the effectiveness of vaccines in a more con