Oooh, sounds a little haphazard. Not sure that I'd envy the 78 volunteers, but I suppose it's the only hope to get this ugly monster under control and that can't happen soon enough.
There's lab workers who would love to be able to get an inoculation for this. I'm sure there's far more than 78 people interested. When you work in the labs with this stuff day-in and day-out, you get vaccinated for what you can, even with the precautions they take.
The process to get a vaccine approved can be really long. It might sound haphazard, but at the stage of development we're talking about now, it's really straightforward. They've already gone through the manufacturing and consistency and quality issues, and now they need to show clinical (that means in humans) safety and efficacy. They already know they have an antigen that produces antibodies. They know it's safe in animal models. They know it protects in animal models. They know what an effective dose is in animals. Now they go into humans in limited numbers, and look at a few dosing regimens, like one dose or one followed by a booster. They look at adverse reactions, like fever and swelling, pain at the injection site, all of those familiar signs and anything less familiar that might pop up. After they determine what the maximum safe dose is, then you are ready for efficacy. For things like ebola, you can't plan on an outbreak. But now there is an active one, so they can get the vaccine into a high risk population, which means they won't need a huge trial with thousands of cases enrolled. Once you prove efficacy, they should have pretty much all they need to get a marketing authorization, and start commercial production of the vaccine. That's a lot further away than the limited clinical trials that will take place in the coming months.
