Thread: Those Ebola Vaccines in Testing Now? You Can Thank Dick Cheney for That

We have seen what the NIH under Obama has been spending it's budget on - trivial and inane projects for liberal interests that have no impact on the country as a whole.. It takes years to develop a vaccine and the research and development of the current crop of Ebola vaccines has been years in coming. the Obama administration actually CUT the funds for vaccine research noticeably in 2010.

Those Ebola Vaccines in Testing Now? You Can Thank Dick Cheney for That

Melissa Quinn
October 24, 2014

(Photo: The Heritage Foundation)

Democrats looking to blame Republicans for the lack of an Ebola vaccine may owe Dick Cheney an apology.

It turns out that as vice president, Cheney was the driving force behind more funding for the National Institutes of Health that helped lead to the development of Ebola vaccines being tested today.

From the time scientists first discovered the deadly virus in 1976 to 2012, two dozen outbreaks of Ebola claimed the lives of roughly 1,500 people–far less than the nearly 5,000 killed in the current outbreak in West Africa.

Bloomberg News reports that little money had been available to scientists to work on finding a cure to the disease. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Cheney, anticipating the potential for bioterrorist attacks, became the Bush White House’s point man advocating more spending to protect the nation from deadly pathogens.

Cheney told Bloomberg:

It has ramifications when the source of the problem you’re dealing with is something like an outbreak of Ebola, but our prime motivation was to make certain we were prepared to deal with an attempt to use those substances in an attack.

>>> Why Budget Cuts Have Nothing to Do with Developing an Ebola Vaccine

Since 2001, the National Institutes of Health’s budget to study biodefense measures has increased from $53 million to $1.6 billion.

Of the drugs now in testing phases, including some to help Americans diagnosed with Ebola, seven were developed because of the additional resources made available after 9/11.

In 2004, Congress passed Project Bioshield, legislation that allocated $5.6 billion for purchasing, developing and storing drugs that could be used in the event of a bioterrorist attack. When President George W. Bush signed the bill into law, he commended Cheney for his role in its passage.

“I want to thank the vice president for his hard work,” Bush said during remarks in the Rose Garden. “He was the point man in the White House on this piece of legislation and did excellent work.”

In addition to Project Bioshield, the government boosted funding for basic research that runs high risks of failure. From 2000 to 2013, Ebola funding at NIH increased from $840,000 to $42.5 million.

>>> A Doctor’s Take: How Medical Professionals Can Lead on Ebola

One potential Ebola vaccine that grew out of the jump in funding was developed by Johnson & Johnson and is about to be tested on humans. In May, the company says, it will have 250,000 doses ready and another 1 million prepared next year.

Two vaccines being tested by NewLink Genetics Inc. and Profectus Biosciences were developed largely because of funding from the Department of Defense and NIH.

“[The government] did the best we could,” Cheney told Bloomberg. “It was all viewed as part of the cost of responding to 9/11 and the ongoing terrorism threat.”

>>> From Africa to the U.S.: Ebola in One Timeline

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/24/democrats-looking-blame-republicans-lack-ebola-vaccine-may-owe-dick-cheney-apology/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

No, budget cuts aren't the reason we don't have an Ebola vaccine

Updated by Sarah Kliff on October 16, 2014, 2:20 p.m. ET @sarahkliff sarah@vox.com

One of the biggest challenges of fighting the ongoing Ebola outbreak is that we have no known cure, or treatment, for the disease. When doctors treat Ebola, all they can do is keep the patient's immune system as strong as possible, so that he or she can fight off the vicious infection.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says it doesn't have to be this way. In an interview with the Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Collins argued that we don't have an Ebola vaccine because of budget cuts at the NIH.

"If we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support," Collins told Stein, "We probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

But is that true? There are two assumptions embedded in Collins' remarks. One is that Ebola vaccine research has been hurt by National Institute of Health budget cuts. The other is that, without those budget cuts, Ebola was on the fast path to a successful vaccine. Neither of these claims, when you dig into the data, appear to hold up especially well.

Government funding for Ebola research has been steady (and small)

There has no doubt been a slowdown in the National Institute of Health's budget's growth in recent years.

The NIH's budget rose rapidly during the early 2000s, growing from $17 billion in 2000 to a peak of $31 billion in 2010. This meant more money for everything. The budget for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the unit that researches Ebola — grew from $3.7 billion to $4.7 billion over that time period.

Funding then began to decline in 2010 and has continued to fall slightly over the past four years (this was during a period when Obama was in the White House, Democrats controlled the Senate, and Republicans controlled the House). By 2013, funding was down to $29.3 billion. These figures do not account for inflation.



So how did this affect Ebola research? It's hard to get exact numbers, since the NIH only began reporting information on how much it spent on particular diseases in 2010. But what that data shows is that the NIH has consistently spent a relatively small amount of money on Ebola research since 2010.

At my request, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology pulled data from an NIH reporting database on funding for various diseases. They included data on hemorrhagic fevers (essentially Ebola and Marburg) and other infectious diseases, like the flu and malaria. Here's what funding patterns have looked like since 2010:



There was a decline in funding for Ebola research between 2010 and 2011, from $142 million to $101 million, respectively. This was when stimulus funding dollars ran out, and the entire agency had to cut back. Since 2011, funding has been small and slightly declining: research for Ebola and Marburg received $101 million in grants in 2011, $100 million in 2012 and $96 million in 2013, after the sequester took effect.

In fact, the cuts to Ebola research have been less severe than cuts for research on other diseases. The numbers show that Ebola research funding fell 4 percent between 2012 and 2013. During the same time frame, malaria funding fell by 7 percent — and overall NIAID dollars dropped by 5.5 percent.

Vaccine research is unpredictable

NIH funding definitely matters. "It's fair to say that, without the budget cuts, we would be closer to a cure than we are right now," says Benjamin Corb at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. "We would have understood the virus and perhaps understood how to counteract the virus if we didn't have budget cuts."

But as Corb pointed out to me, there's a long space between being closer to a vaccine — and "probably" having one (which is what Collins claimed).

Drug research is incredibly unpredictable. Building any vaccine is a long, tedious job typically marked with failure. From the lab to the pharmacy, a typical drug takes about 12 years to build. Of the 5,000 different compounds that drug companies experiment with, five typically make it to human tests — and one gets approved for sale.


Most drugs do not survive this process, and it's incredibly hard to know whether the candidate Ebola vaccines would be winners or losers. Drug manufacturers can only find this out when they go into trials. They find out if the treatments that work well in animal models are safe and effective in humans.

There have been a handful of Ebola vaccine trials that began in 2003; none of them have thus far made it past phase 1, although the NIH does say the information learned in early trials has helped inform further drug development.

The part of Collins' statement that irks scientists is the sense of certainty, the idea that if only more money had been spent, we'd likely have a vaccine by now. They know that's not how vaccine development works. Scientists don't get to name a price for the development of a vaccine — the science is just too uncertain.

SCIENTISTS DON'T GET TO NAME THE PRICE TAG OF FINDING A VACCINE. RESEARCH IS TOO UNCERTAIN.

The NIH is not the only player necessary to take vaccines to market. The agency's role in pharmaceutical development is usually basic research, giving scientists grants to look at how diseases function and what can stop them.

When it's time to use that science to build a vaccine, that's where drug companies typically come in, paying for the trials and manufacturing. We don't know whether, in a world where the NIH had more funding, a pharmaceutical company would have stepped forward to do this. There's decent reason to believe there wouldn't have been; a vaccine to treat Ebola, an infrequent disease that hits low-income areas of the world, is hardly a blockbuster.

It's possible that, in the wake of this Ebola outbreak, the United States decides to put more money towards Ebola research. But that extra funding will not be a guarantee that a vaccine is right around the corner. That just isn't how drug research works.

CARD 13 OF 13LAUNCH CARDS

There's no cure for Ebola — but a number of candidates are being studied

Even though Ebola has been known for almost 40 years, vaccine and drug development for the disease has been slow at best. Notably, most of the investment in Ebola cures has come from government agencies (such as the US Department of Defense) interested in researching potential biological terrorism weapons — not in helping Africa.

But the Ebola epidemic burning in West Africa has sparked unprecedented focus on finding an Ebola cure and speeding up the drug testing and approval process for the current therapies being developed.

In September 2014, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline announced it took the unprecedented step of starting mass production on an Ebola vaccine that has just begun being tested in humans.

THE USUAL DRUG APPROVAL PROCESSES ARE BEING CONDENSED OR SKIPPED

That news followed a decision by the World Health Organization to allow unproven and experimental treatments on people in this public health emergency — which means the usual drug approvals process will be condensed or phases of clinical testing potentially skipped.

One such drug is ZMapp, an antibody therapy that was used in the two American medical missionaries infected with Ebola in Liberia. The drug was developed by several stakeholders — Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Inc. and LeafBio in San Diego, Defyrus Inc. from Toronto, the U.S. government and the Public Health Agency of Canada — to treat Ebola. It's made up of a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, which are essentially lab-produced molecules manufactured from tobacco plants that mimic the body's immune response to theoretically help it attack the Ebola virus.


The truth is, while these patients did improve after receiving the drug, a third patient who got ZMapp died. We won't know whether the drug worked or whether it's harmful on the basis of data from three patients, especially since half of those infected with this strain of the virus live anyway.


Kent Brantly, one of the American medical missionaries infected with Ebola. (Photo by Jessica McGowan)

Another experimental therapy now being tried in humans is TKM-Ebola, developed by the Canadian pharmaceutical company Tekmira (with the help of US Department of Defense funding). After being shown to reduce mortality in Ebola-infected monkeys, the FDA froze and then re-started clinical trials recently.

Both the Liberian national who died from Ebola in Dallas and the American NBC freelance cameraman who survived Ebola in Nebraska received the experimental drug brincidofovir.

Whether this Ebola drug development actually turns out to be the silver lining of the worst epidemic in history remains to be seen. For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this stage, only about five are allowed to be tried in humans. These Ebola therapies are at only the earliest stage of drug testing, and they have a long way to go before proving useful. What's more, an Ebola drug won't fix all the health systems issues that allowed the disease to spread in Africa.

As Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine: "While these interventions remain on accelerated development paths, public health measures are available today that have a proven record of controlling (Ebola) outbreaks. Premature deployment of unproven interventions could cause inadvertent harm, compromising an already strained relationship between health care professionals and patients in West Africa."

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/16/6987825/ebola-budget-nih-collins-vaccine

It looks like NIH had different priorities for grant money instead of vaccine research.
http://www.alipac.us/f19/%2439-643-3...accine-313046/