Janssen Pharmaceutical and Bavarian Nordic will provide up to 200,000 regimens of its investigational Ebola vaccine to the Republic of Rwanda to support a new immunization program.
The vaccine regimen, which consists of the MVA-BN Filo vaccine from Bavarian Nordic and the Ad26.ZEBOV vaccine from Janssen, will protect Rwandans from the Ebola outbreak in the neighboring country of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in the DRC a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). There have been more than 3,300 cases and 2,200 deaths in the region. It is the second-largest outbreak in the area.
In October, Johnson & Johnson said it would donate 500,000 regimens of the investigational vaccine to be part of an expanded response in DRC.
In July 2019, the fear of further spread of Ebola to Rwanda heightened when two cases were reported in the DRC city of Goma, located near the Rwandan border.
“We applaud the decision by the Rwandan authorities to introduce the Janssen/Bavarian Nordic vaccine to help prevent the Ebola virus from spreading into the country, and we are proud to be a contributing partner in the development of a vaccine which is now actively being used in large-scale efforts to contain the virus in both the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda,” Paul Chaplin, president and CEO of Bavarian Nordic, said.