The World Health Organization hopes to deploy experimental vaccines and treatments to combat an outbreak of Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadlier than Ebola, in Equatorial Guinea. The day after Equatorial Guinea announced the outbreak this week, the WHO called a meeting of experts and developers of vaccines and treatments to see how many vaccine doses and treatment courses were available to potentially test. Nine people are thought to have died after people started coming down with infections in early January. Sixteen people are in health facilities with mild symptoms, and 21 contacts are being monitored at home, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. Marburg is transmitted from fruit bats and spreads among humans through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people and contaminated surfaces. No vaccines and treatments are licensed to treat the virus, which has caused rare and small outbreaks since it was discovered in 1967. What’s next: A WHO expert committee will decide which of five experimental vaccines to test in a clinical trial if Equatorial Guinean authorities sign off. All five have been shown to be protective in monkeys. Two vaccines, both based on adenoviruses, have gone through Phase 1 tests in people, showing they’re generally safe. One is produced by Sabin Vaccine Institute and the other by Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine division. The three other vaccines use the same harmless animal virus employed in Ervebo, Merck’s licensed vaccine against the Zaire strain of Ebola. They’re under development by IAVI, a nonprofit research organization; Public Health Vaccines, a biotech company; and vaccine makers Auro and Emergent. Even so: There might not be enough vaccines ready to go. Sabin has only a few hundred doses on hand, while Public Health Vaccines has about 300. Janssen has about 3,500 doses, which expire in April. But its vaccine has a downside: It’s made of two doses, given 56 days apart, which makes it unlikely to quell the outbreak quickly, even if it’s effective. The WHO says at least two drugs could be tested as treatments: a monoclonal antibody developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical and drugmaker Gilead’s remdesivir, which has been licensed against Covid and has shown effectiveness against the Zaire strain of Ebola. Gilead and its manufacturing partners have enough doses for testing in Equatorial Guinea, a company representative said. | 
