Ebola is a devastating disease; as the size of the West Africa outbreak became clear in late 2014, Merck knew it had to engage. Merck has committed to accelerate the continued development, production and, if licensed, distribution of an effective Ebola vaccine. When a corporation decides to make a vaccine, they need a strategy for how to license the product. It is difficult to plan the effective release of a vaccine considering the time it takes to launch products. A number of factors influence effective release including the speed at which the disease spreads, targeting areas where disease incidents are most concentrated, the ease with which the vaccine can be licensed in those areas, the ability for patients in those areas to afford new vaccines, and the amount of time required for the viral immunity to take effect on vaccinated individuals.
The 2015 Merck Challenge is to recommend a “Go to Deployment” strategy for an Ebola vaccine that will have the greatest benefit to world health, and to quantify and visualize the impact this strategy will have on the outbreak of the disease over time. Specifically, your analysis should address one or more of the following questions:
- Where and how should the vaccine be deployed to achieve the greatest impact?
- How fast does Ebola spread, and how quickly could the Ebola vaccine begin to lower the spread? What comparable products could be used as a guide to support your projections?
- Are there any risks in your proposed strategy, i.e., patient income, vaccine licensing, patient access to vaccine? For these risks, recommend possible courses of action.
As part of this analysis, please feel free to draw conclusions and make inferences from the historical trends seen in comparable products (for example: the meningitis vaccine, penicillin, Crixivan and other HIV treatments).
Data
The following resources provide examples of public data that can be useful in your analysis. You may also use any other reputable sources that are relevant to your analysis.
Outbreak Data – data describing historical trends on outbreaks like # of cases / deaths over time.
- Vaccine Map from the Council on Foreign Relations’
Vaccination Rates – historical data on vaccination rate across time, across geographies (countries), etc.
- Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Data Page from the World Health Organization
- Immunization Summary, 2013 from the World Health Organization
- Reported Estimates of DTP1 Vaccine Coverage from the World Health Organization
- Immunization Coverage from the World Health Organization
Medication Impact – data demonstrating reduction or eradication of diseases after a medication is introduced (comparable products in therapeutic categories such as penicillin, HIV, polio, malaria, plague, etc.)
- Effectiveness of an oral cholera vaccine in Zanzibar: findings from a mass vaccination campaign and observational cohort study, research article from The Lancet
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