There is a new ebola vaccine. And it works spectacularly well. A recent paper in the Lancet demonstrated of the 7,600 people in Guinea who received the vaccine, not one person contracted the virus.
Dr. Jeremy Farrar is on the line to discuss the implications of this vaccine for the fight against ebola. He is a professor of tropical medicine and director of the Welcome Trust, a philanthropy that supports medical research. We discuss how the vaccine trial was conducted, how the results can be analyzed and what an effective vaccine might mean for the global fight against ebola. Dr. Farrar has also very prominently called for the creation of a global vaccine fund to spur the development and deployment of vaccines to counter fast emerging epidemics. We have a lively conversation about this proposal.