Скачать или смотреть Enquête | Profits First: The Story of the Ebola Vaccine

This story was aired in French on February 4 2016, on Enquête (Radio-Canada.)

In July 2015, the news travelled around the world. Preliminary reports were showing positive results for a vaccine against Ebola. But the epidemic was almost over and had already claimed more than 10,000 lives.

Yet the Canadian vaccine had been proven effective in tests on primates a decade before the crisis hit West Africa.

We set out to find out why the vaccine was not made available earlier to the affected populations and we traced its journey from the Lab in Winnipeg where it was developed, to the clinical trials in Guinea and it’s licensing to pharmaceutical giant Merck.

Our investigation on the Canadian vaccine illustrates the hard reality of the pharmaceutical industry. Many promising treatments for countless diseases in the developing world never make it to market because of a lack of potential in reaping profits. The Ebola crisis seemingly shook the established protocols to the core. But whether the world is now better prepared for the next epidemic, remains to be seen.

Reporter: Chantal Lavigne
Producer: Catherine Varga
Journalist-Researcher: Benoît Michaud
Cameramen: Martin Cloutier, Denis Christopherson, Luc Delorme, Jean-Pierre Gandin, Jérôme Voyer-Poirier
Audio technicians: Marc-Antoine Fournier, Richard Guérard
Editor: Bernard Lapointe