Geneva (AFP)

A global emergency reserve of 500,000 doses of Ebola vaccine will be created to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership that helped immunize half of the disease, announced on Tuesday. of the world's children against some of the deadliest diseases.

Low- and middle-income countries will be able to access this reserve free of charge, said the international organization based in Geneva.

These countries will also receive support for the operational costs of organizing a vaccination program.

"By creating a stockpile of 500,000 doses of Ebola vaccine available to all countries, we can help prevent deaths and quickly end epidemics in the future," said Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi.

The doses will be stored in Basel, Switzerland.

Development of the Ebola vaccine was accelerated after the worst outbreak of the particularly deadly disease, which began in December 2013 in Guinea and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The epidemic had killed more than 11,300 out of nearly 29,000 recorded cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which declared the end of this epidemic in March 2016.

The rapid development of the vaccine against Ebola, under agreements between Gavi and the manufacturer, "set a precedent for the accelerated development and production of vaccines against Covid-19," said Seth Berkley.

The stock of Ebola vaccines will include doses produced by the US pharmaceutical company Merck.

The delivery of these doses is funded to the tune of $ 20 million by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

A spokesperson for Gavi told AFP that it would take "a few years" to build up the stock of 500,000 doses.

The Ebola death rate is around 50%, but can reach 90% of people infected in some epidemics.

The disease manifests as fever and muscle pain followed by nausea and diarrhea, rash, internal and external bleeding, and kidney failure.

In November, the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared the end of the last Ebola outbreak in its territory, which killed 55 people in nearly six months in Equateur province.

More than 40,000 people had been vaccinated.

© 2021 AFP