no financial incentive to develop ebola vaccine...the fact that people are dying isn't enough

[Yo_Mama]

20. This is nonsense

There have been pre-attempts, but the reality is that no vaccine could be tested, because there were so few human cases. So the research was just taken to a certain level and then kind of held.

You really can only prepare and test vaccines for illnesses that have a certain residual level of human infections. When "large" outbreaks occur years and perhaps a decade apart, and consist of under 500 cases, there's no way to even test a vaccine. When they occur sporadically, from different viruses, and in different geographic settings, there's no way to predict an outbreak to test efficacy. Any attempt to do so would be unethical.

How could any regulatory agency approve a vaccine without proof that it works? What would be the point? Vaccines have to be given to a large group of people to work, and all vaccines carry some risk of adverse effects to their recipients. You are not going to inoculate millions of people for a disease that might kill 200 people in five years, because you'd create more harm to humans than possible benefit. Instead public health measures against Ebola have concentrated on an effective early response to outbreaks.

Obviously now that has changed. There are already experimental vaccines. From WHO:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/01-october-2014/en/

They'll probably be first tested on HCW, who can knowledgeably assent and are at high risk if working in the affected areas.

Until you had something like we have now, you could never have a commercial vaccine.