The Australian at the forefront of the fight against Ebola – and the next pandemic

Ebola is at the centre of a plan to prepare for disease X – the next global pandemic.

Jane Halton was in the room with the world’s top health chiefs as the World Health Organisation rang its most serious alarm about the Ebola outbreak.

Those gathered on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly in Geneva included WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had just declared the spreading sickness in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a public health emergency of international concern.

“Terribly, in the course of that meeting, Tedros was getting text messages from WHO people on the ground who were actually being fired on in their tent,” Halton recalled of the May meeting. “It’s a very dangerous part of the world.”

Halton ran the Australian Health Department as secretary between 2002 and 2014, and was enmeshed with Australia’s pandemic response while serving on the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission.

Her remit expanded worldwide when she became chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). It’s a pandemic-busting alliance of government bodies, scientific outfits and civil organisations formed in the aftermath of the largest ever Ebola outbreak, which began in 2014. The viral haemorrhagic fever then infected 28,600 people and killed 11,325 across West Africa.

The current outbreak, some experts fear, could rival that disaster. There have been 569 confirmed cases and 103 deaths as of June 7 across the DRC and Uganda. Modelling shows that the actual case number could be double that. WHO chief Tedros warned last week that the disease may have festered for four months, spreading through bodily fluids including blood, vomit and semen, before the outbreak was announced on May 15.

The region was ambushed by a rare strain of the Bundibugyo virus with no vaccine or treatment. Amid it all, bullets fly between warring militias, and misinformation adds to the violence. Medical tents have been torched by grieving family members of the dead who do not believe the virus killed their loved ones.

Last week, a group of young men stormed a hospital in eastern Congo to seize the bodies of two relatives. During the chaos, CNN reported, 18 suspected Ebola patients left the facility and disappeared.

These are nightmare conditions for disease containment. But CEPI has just poured $87 million into three possible weapons against the disease – a shot in the arm for three Bundibugyo vaccine candidates in early stages of development.

It’s a scattergun strategy that paid dividends during the last pandemic. “During COVID, CEPI had