Is the new Ebola vaccine too good to be true?

Ebola is on the run: the number of cases dipped below ten a week recently, and a few days ago investigators announced in the prestigious journal The Lancet that a new Ebola vaccine was “100% effective.”

In response, global health authorities are starting to sound a little giddy. “We believe that the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine,” said Marie Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation (and a senior author on the paper). “It could be a game changer.”

She’s right: this is wonderful news, and a great testament to human ingenuity. A genetically engineered hybrid of the benign vesicular stomatitis virus and the Zaire strain of Ebola, together called rVSV-ZEBOV, was tested in a multi-site clinical trial conducted amid a massive aid response in Guinea, one of the poorest countries in Africa. The scientific and logistical acrobatics required to pull this off boggle the mind.

Yet, for three reasons, we cannot know if the vaccine really worked, or how well. 

To read more, check out my new post over at The Conversation.

Lessons from the 2014 Ebola epidemic

I was honored to have my thoughts included with those of luminaries like Anthony Fauci of the NIH in The Atlantic's year-end review of lessons learned from the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Click here to read the whole article by Julie Beck.

Doctors Should Not Deny Ebola Patients CPR

The first time I did CPR, coagulated blood spurted onto my new white coat from a wound in the patient’s chest. Another time a patient’s urine soaked through the knees of my pants as I knelt at his side.

Even in the best of conditions, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a spit-smeared, bloody business that can expose health care workers to all kinds of body fluids. Like all health care workers, I put on gloves and a game face and accept such things as part of patient care.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak changes all that. It is much more dangerous for clinicians to resuscitate patients with Ebola. As a result, should we skip CPR altogether? Bioethicist Joseph Fins of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University recently suggested we should.

I disagree. See my rebuttal at Health Affairs. What do you think?