Kinshasa (AFP)

Behind the Organizational Conflict of the Ebola Response Born After President Felix Tshisekedi's Decision to Build on a Team of Experts in Leading the Fight Against this Epidemic in the Eastern Democratic Republic from the Congo, there is also the refusal of the experimentation of a Belgian vaccine.

Health Minister Dr. Oly Ilunga justified his decision to have been disavowed by President Felix Tshisekedi's decision to take control of the Ebola response, which killed 1,737 people in a year. eastern DRC and whose cumulative number of cases is 2,578, including 2,484 confirmed and 94 probable, according to the bulletin of the Ministry of the Interior dated Sunday.

"As a result of your decision to place the response to the Ebola outbreak under your direct supervision and anticipating the prejudicial cacophony of response that will inevitably result from this decision, I hereby submit my resignation as Minister of Health, "the minister wrote in a letter to President Tshisekedi.

"As in any war, because that is what it is about in this fight, there can not be several centers of decision at the risk of creating confusion (...) The uniqueness in the management of Such a response responds to the triple imperative of effectiveness, coherence of decisions and accountability, "said Dr. Ilunga.

For him, confusion is on the horizon. "The current Ebola crisis is not a humanitarian crisis, it is a public health crisis that is taking place in an environment characterized by security problems".

He lamented "pressures from all sides that tend to turn into a humanitarian crisis whose logics of intervention consecrate the establishment of a parallel system that never strengthens the existing health system".

As a result, according to Dr. Ilunga, "strong pressure has been exerted for several months for the implementation of a new experiment in the DRC" in the fight against Ebola.

"The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck," said Monday the bulletin of the Ministry of Health, indicating that 169,976 people were vaccinated.

- "Lack of ethics" -

The minister had opposed in a circular the introduction of the second vaccine produced by the Belgian laboratory Janssen, a subsidiary of the American Johnson & Johnson, said his entourage.

"It would be unrealistic to believe that the new vaccine (two doses administered 56 days apart), proposed by actors who have demonstrated a manifest lack of ethics by voluntarily hiding important information from the health authorities, can have a decisive impact on the control of the ongoing epidemic, "said Minister Ilunga.

On Saturday, President Tshisekedi appointed a team of experts led by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the director of the Congolese Institute of Biomedical Research Kinshasa (INRB), to ensure the "conduct" of the Ebola response in DRC under his "supervision".

Dr. Muyembe "was part of the research team investigating the first known outbreak of Ebola in 1976," reads the website of the World Health Organization (WHO).

In his entourage, it is said that some members of the committee could defend the introduction of the second vaccine, hence the deep issue of resignation.

Another dispute between the two men exists: Dr. Oly Ilunga was excluded from the UDPS party after joining the Kabila government in late 2016, almost 45 days before the death in Brussels of the old opponent, father of the current president.

For the party of the late founder of the UDPS, Étienne Tshisekedi, it was a high treason because Tshisekedi-father was treated in a hospital in Belgium where Dr. Oly Ilunga held high office.

The Health Minister's resignation also comes after the WHO's decision to elevate the current Ebola outbreak to the rank of "public health emergency of international concern".

© 2019 AFP