By RFIPosted on 15-11-2019Modified on 15-11-2019 at 12:10

Doctors Without Borders is launching this trial in two neighborhoods in Goma, despite controversy. Indeed, civil society recalls that this injection was the subject of a controversy that has not really been lifted.

A second vaccine to fight the Ebola outbreak was introduced Thursday in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a clinical trial implemented by Médecins sans Frontières in two districts of the big city of North Kivu.

MSF wants to target 50,000 people over four months, with this experimental vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson's US laboratories. A first vaccine developed by the Merck laboratory has already helped to vaccinate more than 250,000 people at risk in recent months, east of the DRC.

Different use

The new vaccine used by MSF is not used under the same conditions as the first one, explains Veronique Urbaniak, immunization coordinator for MSF in Goma: " The Merck vaccine for the moment is used for contacts, contacts and contacts. frontline workers. It is not accessible to the population. The second vaccine, it is proposed to be tested in the population that is not targeted by the first, but still wants to be protected against the disease and the Ebola virus. "

A vaccine that has already been tested according to Veronique Urbaniak: " It had already been tested on a small number of people at the end of the epidemic in West Africa. But the end of the epidemic had stopped this study. It has since been tested in Uganda, Sierra Leone. He will be tested in Rwanda. There are about 6,000 to 7,000 people who have received this vaccine. This allowed us to show that it was not dangerous and that, a priori, it offered protection. But now, we need to do a study on a larger scale to really test the effectiveness on the ground. It's a study, so we do not force anyone to come. It will never be obligatory. "

Many reserves

The introduction of this second vaccine was preceded by many controversies. In July, former Congolese health minister Oly Ilunga resigned, denouncing pressure and " interference " to impose the second vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. Civil society also expressed concern about the roll-out of the clinical study that has just started in Goma.

Dr. Serge Sivya, health advisor in the Fight for Change movement (La Lucha), expressed his reservations: " Why introduce a second vaccine that is a vaccine that is experimental? Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe is himself the principal investigator of this vaccine. All the time he was not in response, the vaccine was not allowed. But the day he came in as the coordinator of the response, the issue resurfaced. And we, we found a little that it was like a forcing. "

What worries Serge Sivya are mainly the side effects: " We tried to talk with the president of Unicef ​​including these side effects which were 3%. They tried to minimize it. But when you talk about severe side effects, it means that they can cause death. 3% is small if it was mild side effects, but when it is heavy side effects, for us it is extremely worrying when we start to mobilize the population. There was such resistance. Is not all this vagueness about this vaccine going to accentuate this resistance ? That's one of the questions we ask ourselves. "

Declared 1 August 2018, this tenth outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever on Congolese soil killed 2,193 people, for 1,067 cures.

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