Science 19 September 2014 has an article by Jon Cohen "Ebola vaccine: Little and late"
With the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continuing to spiral out of control, it's become painfully clear that the tried-and-true strategies to contain outbreaks in the past have failed here. This has spurred hopes that biomedical interventions like vaccines and treatments can help slow the spread and save lives. But the leading biomedical countermeasures, which still are experimental and have just recently gone into humans for the first time, are in short supply. Companies, with help from the U.S. government, are looking at ways to pull out all the stops and ramp up production; but even with an all-out effort and a green light from the early human trials, manufacturers have little hope of having enough doses to make a dent in this epidemic for at least 9 months.
A large part of the reason we have even the experimental treatments we do is because for the past few years the
US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) has done cutting-edge research on Ebola treatments -- specifically, experiments with monoclonal antibody treatments -- and has contracted with the private sector to produce the ZMapp mAb treatment. If this public sector, publically funded research had not been done by USAMRIID we would be in even worse shape to fight the Ebola epidemic than we are now.
USAMRIID has been proactive in its work on Ebola. But we as a society have not been proactive enough, and as a result we are scrambling to produce drugs in sufficient quantites to make a dent in this epidemic.
The lesson of this epidemic is that we need to revitalize and grow a public-sector health research and production capacity which is not beholden to the profit margins of the big pharma companies that want to make lifestyle drugs -- Lipitors rather than Vancomycin follow-ons -- because that is where the money is.
The Obama Administration has rightly treated biosafety as a matter of national defense,
and USAMRIID deserves recognition for the role they have played. But what we have done is not enough. The world is, frankly, endangered by Ebola more than it is endangered by IS. The US has an enormous military infrastructure to deal with "terrorists", which it can deploy anywhere at the order of the president. We can certainly develop an adequate biodefense infrastructure.