Science, October 23, 2022
The VSV platform used in Merck’s shots was first developed nearly 20 years ago by virologists including Thomas Geisbert, then with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. During West Africa’s Zaire outbreak, which engulfed the capitals of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in 2014 and sickened tens of thousands of people in a matter of months, including a handful in Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, the United States, and Europe. “It was really frustrating because we had vaccines that were developed back in the early 2000s, and we knew that they would work, but we're just lab guys,” says Geisbert, who now has a lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch.